Here is this week’s news — or at least some of it. Plus a couple of announcements.
We are processing the garlic and could use some help. If you like sitting down. If you like cutting stems. And if you like counting. This is the job for you! We can set you up to process the garlic at your convenience — just let me know when you want to drop by. This is a limited time offer. Once all the garlic has been processed the opportunity will be gone. So act now.
If you or someone you know is looking to get paid to have fun farming, send them our way! We could use the help!
Still taking back pint clam shell containers. Drop them off in the tent or in your tote.
What will we have this week?
Lots of cherry tomatoes! Lots of cucumbers still. We also have tomatoes, tomatillos, a few beans (or maybe we’ll find more once we start harvesting them), a few zucchini, some potatoes, onions, some okra, maybe some cabbage, some Napa cabbage, some garlic and some other things I don’t recall.
It is a flower, cheese and ‘shroom week!
Farm News
Farming is considered one of the most hazardous jobs on the planet. I’m not sure how it ranks in the rest of the universe but it has to be up there in the top ten or 20. In an article in the most trusted news source “USA Today” four of the top ten most hazardous jobs were farm/agriculture jobs. Can’t get much more hazardous than that!
I was reminded of this last Friday when I was staffing the on-farm pick-up tent. Typically working the tent isn’t really a very hazardous job. Sure you can wrench your back lifting a crate full of cucumbers. Or pinch your fingers trying to stack the storage crates into the cooler. But for the most part you’d be hard-pressed to find a way to kill yourself while working the pick-up tent — until this past Friday.
Now I don’t know what the weather was like that day for the rest of the Twin Cities but here it was very warm, and very, very muggy. By about 3:30 it was so muggy drops of water started to form out of thin air — well, not thin air, more like thick air. By the time we got in from the field it was raining pretty hard.
3:30 is tent set-up time and unfortunately there is not a covered way to get the produce from our walk-in cooler in the packing shed into the tent for our members to pick-up. So I braved the elements and took the hit. I got soaked pretty quickly just setting up the tent. Plus, being an egg, fruit and coffee week, there were additional trips into the packing shed to retrieve those items for our members.
Now getting wet isn’t all that hazardous. Sure one could catch a cold (though I don’t think being wet would necessarily cause one to catch cold). I suppose one could become hypothermic, which after the hot day we had probably feels pretty good actually! But with the warm rain that wasn’t happening. No, what was the main life threatening part of Friday’s on-farm pick-up was the lightening. And what a show Mother Nature put on for those of us willing to brave the elements.
They say you can calculate the distance from you to the lightening by counting the seconds between the flash of lightening and the time you hear the thunder, then divide that by 5 to get the distance in miles. So for example, if you see lightening and count to ten before you here the thunder the lightening is 2 miles away. Seems simple.
But how far away is the lightening if you see it and hear the thunder simultaneously? Or how close is the lightening if you see it and feel the thunder simultaneously? Well, that is how close it was as I was standing in the wash area with the rest of the crew and a member of the farm. Yes, being a vegetable farmer is a very dangerous occupation, and so is apparently a CSA farm member picking up their produce!
Anyway, one of these lightening strikes cut power to the farm. And without power the walk-in cooler doesn’t have cooling capabilities and more importantly light. So now the hazards increase yet again! Poking around in the cooler without any light was quite the physical challenge fraught with all sorts of potential catastrophic events. If it wasn’t for the steel toe boots I could have stubbed my toe quite badly.
Of course the count the seconds approach is only an estimate of the distance the lightening struck. In my case, I had a way to determine exactly how far away one of the lightening strikes was without the use of mathematics. When we got our power restored about 3 hours after it went out I discovered our internet connection was not working. Our internet service is a wireless service that has a transmitter on our roof that communicates with another transmitter on a silo up the street from us. The transmitter on the silo up the street from us got fried by one of the lightening strikes. Apparently if the lightening strike hits less than a half mile from your house you won’t have time to count until the thunder arrives. The more you know!
I don’t know if being less than a half mile from a lightening strike counts as hazardous but I would consider it so. And who besides dumb farmers — and CSA members — would be out and about in a metal shed during a lightening storm? So I have to believe USA Today is correct about farming being one of the most hazardous jobs in America. But maybe its because we’re not too bright.
Idea of the Week
If you are finding fruit flies in your kitchen this time of year the best way to get rid of them is with this simple, homemade fruit fly trap. Take a small jar, like a pint or half pint. Put a 1/2″ to and inch of apple cider vinegar in the jar. Add a drop of dish soap. Set on the counter near where you are seeing fruit flies. The flies will be drawn to the vinegar. They will try to land but the dish soap breaks the surface tension causing the fruit fly to sink and drown. Easy-peasy! No more fruit flies! And if you’d like to get into the scientific details of why this works, check out this newsletter.
Recipe of the Week
This week we are giving the delivery folks some tomatillos so I thought I should include this recipe for them to try!
Salsa Verde
Equipment
- 1 Food processor
Ingredients
- 1 lb tomatillos
- 1 to many hot peppers to taste
- ¼ c sweet onions
- 1 small bunch cilantro
Instructions
- Put hot peppers and cilantro in the food processor and pulse until well chopped.
- Add onion and pulse until just chopped (not too much or you will liquefy it).
- Add tomatillos and pulse until desired consistency.
- Add salt if desired.
Notes
Joke of the Week
Why did the squished tomato stop crossing the road?
It ran out of juice.
This joke was modified from one a cashier told me this past weekend. Not sure how we got to him telling me a joke but it made it into this week’s newsletter!
As always, send in your questions, comments, suggestions, jokes, time preferences for garlic processing and any other thing you feel we could find interesting.