We were really “down to earth” here at Fresh Earth Farms today. Like really down. So down we were below ground. Today we finally finished harvesting the garlic, which happens to grow underground. And once we were done with the garlic we continued our below ground day by digging carrots. We really worked our core muscle groups!
The garlic is curing in our patent pending garlic curing chamber. It will take a couple weeks to cure, then we cut it, sort it and start giving it out. Growing and processing garlic is not particularly time consuming except when you grow somewhere around 6000 bulbs. Even a minute of time per bulb adds up to hours of work – 100 hours to be exact.
All this digging reminded me that I should give you the dirt on our dirt. Everything we grow here at the farm is grown in dirt. In fact most of our farm is dirt. And without dirt we’d have no farm. So we should all be thankful for our dirt.
Our dirt is a silty loam. How wonderful is that? The nice thing about our silty loam dirt is it is a great medium for growing veggies. The only real downside is it doesn’t want to let go of the veggies. It takes some scrubbing to get the carrots and potatoes clean. We rarely get garlic with a bright white outer skin; the soil stains the wrappers and scrubbing with water would just ruin the garlic. So sometimes your produce arrives with a bit of our farm included free of charge. Hopefully you have invested in a good scrub brush (better to scrub carrots and potatoes than to peel them; it is less time consuming and you get all that extra nutrition).
But our dirt does hold water pretty well, which has come in handy most seasons. It has over 5% organic matter which is pretty high for farmed land. Native grasslands typically have around 6% organic matter. I attribute our soil’s organic content to our use of cover crops and the tremendous ability of weeds to generate biomass. Sometimes having weeds in your fields is a benefit!
What will we have this week? This week is a great week to eat veggies here in Minnesota. This week we have in abundance: tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, onions and sweet corn. We also have smaller quantities of cherry tomatoes, cabbage, tomatillos, eggplants, sweet peppers, summer squash and beets. The spring broccoli and cauliflower are done. Cukes are waning. (Note for next year: We need to reinstitute the two succession cuke planting so that we have cukes later in the season). Beans will be ramping up again soon, maybe by Friday or Monday (we keep track so you Wednesday/Thursday members will get just as many beans so please be patient). The garlic needs to cure for another week or two, then processed and sorted so it will be a while before we start handing it out. Watermelons are at least a week away. I’m still hopeful but the crows really did a number on them this year.
We need help! We are short workers until the end of the season. If anyone is interested in working here part time for the next month or two please contact me. It is physically demanding work but fresh air is one of our perks! If anyone wants to volunteer a few hours a week we won’t turn you away.
We have FruitShare, CheeseShare, EggShare and IceCreamShare this week. SeafoodShare and SalmonShare arrive Friday of next week (August 29).
Here is another reminder for our Garlic Planting Extravaganza! It will be October 4th starting at 1:00 PM and going until the garlic is planted. Following the planting we will have dinner and a bonfire. Rain dates are the 5th, the 11th, and the 12th. Hopefully we don’t have to reschedule any later than that.
Here is a joke for our soil scientist and geologist members:
Q: What do rocks say when they agree with one another?
A: My sediments exactly.