Not a lot of time for this week’s newsletter but first here are a couple of announcements.
We have a great opportunity for people to farm while sitting in the shade. If this sound appealing to you how about spending a few hours processing the garlic? We’ll provide the chair, the clippers and the shade. We’ll even throw in all the delicious, refreshing well water you care to drink! Let me know if you’d like to lend a hand!
We will take back and reuse the pint-size clam shells we use for cherry tomatoes. Bring them to the farm when you pick up your veggies or leave them in your empty tote at your drop site.
Speaking of cherry tomatoes, when we planted them this past spring we were new to our new waterwheel planter so we did not do a good job of keeping the varieties contiguous. So you will usually get containers that contain two or more types of tomatoes. This wouldn’t be a problem except that two of the tomatoes are small round tomatoes with one being red and the other being orange and unfortunately the red one is orange before it is red. So good luck! Actually the point is to not assume the cherry tomatoes will turn red since some will only ever be orange. In hindsight this seems like way too much information on this topic.
If anyone is looking for a pet lizard and all the related gear contact me. My son Alex selling his lizard before he heads off to college.
Farm News
I always find it strange when weather forecasters say something like, “The high today was 96. We should be at 84 so we’re a bit warm” or something like that. We shouldn’t be at 84. We should be in the mid to low 70s with sunny skies with a gentle ocean breeze lounging in a chair sipping a cold beverage. That’s where we are should be. But we’re not. We’re instead in the hot muggy Midwest where the temperatures are what they should be, which is whatever they are.
Anyway, speaking of weather, a week ago this past Thursday evening I was awoken by the sound of precipitation hitting our roof. If precipitation awakens me it is either really heavy rain or hail. That night it was both. It wasn’t a lot of hail but as I said enough to wake me up. But the rain was certainly heavy. It rained for about an hour and a half and when I checked the rain gauge in the morning it read 4 inches. I’d call that heavy rain.
Then two of the following nights it rained another 1.25 inches and another 1.75 inches. So over the course of a few days we got about 7 inches of rain. I believe that puts us right at about average rainfall for the season so far. It certainly doesn’t feel like an average rainfall type of year. But that is the thing about averages. Averaging really big numbers with really small numbers — or in our case this year with regard to rainfall, 0 — gives you really medium numbers. It is just too bad it has to come all at once. But now we are back into the no rain part of our season. We’ve resumed irrigating after a few days off. Based on the forecast it looks like we will continue irrigating for the near future.
Did someone mention corn? For those who don’t read through the whole newsletter you may have missed my short description of the small corn ears. The small ears on the third planting of corn was due to the lack of rain and our inability to irrigate the corn. My hope was this the rain we got a few weeks ago was going to make the last corn planting wonderful. But instead it is making it… interesting. Looking through the corn patch there seems to be some ears that are big, beautiful, fully ripe with great tip fill. The kind of corn you’d be proud to sell. But right next to that plant will be a few other plants where they are just starting to silk! And then there are a whole bunch in between these degrees of maturity. I don’t recall seeing this much maturity diversity before and it is going to make harvesting and distributing it quite challenging. We can’t just send the crew in and tell them to harvest the corn. They will have to learn how to tell which ears are ready to be picked and which ones we need to leave behind to mature further. And them to top it all off, I’m not sure there is any pollen left to pollinate the new silks. What a topsy-turvy year we are having.
What will we have this week?
A lot of tomatoes. A lot of cherry tomatoes. Also, potatoes, carrots, beans, cucumbers, onions, peppers and a lot of odds and ends like eggplant, kohlrabi, cabbage, cauliflower, tomatillos, okra, and other things…
It is a fruit, egg, ‘shroom, coffee and flower week!
That is all for now. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, etc.