Let’s mix things up a little and start with announcements first.
A friend of the farm, Connie Everson, is doing a study of CSA for her thesis at St. Thomas and has asked us to participate. You will receive a survey with your share this week. If you choose to participate please follow the directions included with the survey. It is completely anonymous and voluntary. I won’t have access to your responses; this is purely for Connie’s research.
One of our workers, Hannah, was accepted into grad school at the University of Minnesota School of Agriculture. Congrats to Hannah!
On a related note, we need another worker for Mondays and Wednesdays starting in September. Let me know if you know anyone. Having energy, enthusiasm, and the ability to regulate your body temperature are all required attributes for the job.
Enough with the announcements (more at the end). On with the education!
With the recent heat wave it seems like a good time to talk about the effect of temperature on vegetables. Unlike farm workers, vegetables do not have the ability to regulate their body temps. They are totally dependant on the air temperature. However like farm members, some vegetables like it hot and some like it cold. I think it has a lot to do with where they were raised. The warm temperature lovers tend to be from tropical regions around the world. The cold temperature lovers tend to be from more temperate zones. We humans have decided that we need to grow all these vegetables in places where they weren’t originally raised, which is why farming is so difficult. If we could only grow things that are native to our climate it would be far easier to get vegetables to grow. But with the advent of faster transportation and refrigeration, the American palate has become accustom to having a cornucopia of food from across the globe. And now we want it all local. Talk about piling it on!
So we farmers do what we can to provide this assortment within the confines of Mother Nature’s thermostat. After many years of observations and record keeping we have determined that it is cooler in the spring and fall and warmer in the summer. With this knowledge we put our collective heads together and decided to grow the cool season crops – those from temperate areas of the world – during the spring and fall and the warm season crops – those from tropical locales – in the summer. Pretty clever eh?
But here is the rub: We Minnesota based farmers do not have enough cool season in the spring and fall nor enough warm season in the summer to properly grow and mature the veggies. Of course we all know why: Too much #^$&%@ freezing season in the winter. So we do things like build greenhouses and hoop houses to extend the seasons into the #^$&%@ freezing season. Many of the cool season and warm season crops get started in the warm confines of the heated greenhouse. This gives the cool season crops enough of a head start to grow up and mature before it gets too hot and the warm season crops sufficient time to mature before the first frost of the fall brings their season to a close.
So what happens when the cool season crops bump into the warm (or as was this year #^$&%@ hot season)? Depends on the crop. Veggies like lettuce just give up and try to reproduce. Unfortunately lettuce is very bitter when reproducing so it becomes unpalatable. Peas wilt and die. Since the pea pod holds the pea’s future the pea plant just gives up and lets its progeny carry on the family name.
Broccoli gets funky. Not in a bad way necessarily, but in a funky way. The broccoli heads you find in the store are frequently grown in regions of the country that come equipped with air conditioning. Usually the air conditioner is the Pacific Ocean. In areas of the Pacific Northwest and Northern California the ocean keeps the temperatures reasonably cool for an extended season. This allows the broccoli to mature at a time when the air is still cool and therefore you get nice tight conical heads. When we grow it here in Minnesota we try to squeeze it in between the #^$&%@ freezing season and the #^$&%@ hot season. Frequently there isn’t enough time between the two to get the broccoli to mature properly. So the florets in the head start to grow wildly, some extending farther than others. Leaves start to grow between the florets. The result is a funky looking broccoli head. That is what happened this year. The #^$&%@ hot season came too soon. The broccoli still tastes fine, but not as good as broccoli that matures when it is cool; that is what fall broccoli is all about.
Cauliflower can have the same problem. Our cauliflower is just starting to head up so it hasn’t become funky yet. Hopefully temps will cool over the next couple weeks to allow it to mature in a more uniform manner.
Other cool season crops include cabbage, kohlrabi, carrots, kale, chard, and beets. Starting to make sense why you’ve been receiving many of these from the farm so far this year?
As I mentioned earlier, many of the warm season crops need a longer growing season than Minnesota provides, so we start many of these crops in the greenhouse. Once we are confident there will be no more frost in the spring we will transplant them out into the field. There they will merrily grow and produce until the first killing frost in the fall or their natural lifespan ends. Warm season crops include tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, corn, beans, peppers and squash. We are now in that transition period between the cool season spring crops and the warm season summer crops. It is also the time of year we transplant the cool season fall crops. Many of the items you have been getting from the farm you will see again in the fall.
Back to the announcements.
What will we have this week? A mixture of warm and cool season crops of course! This week we will have carrots, fennel, summer squash, cabbage, broccoli, eggplant, green onions, the last of the peas, the last of the garlic scapes, maybe lettuce if it survived the heat, the last of the spring kohlrabi, chard and kale.
FruitShare is Lapin cherries this week.
We still have WinterStorage Shares available. See the web site for details. If you’d like to order one just let me know and I will add it to your account.
Garlic Scape Cream Cheese anyone? We have a few left. Let me know if you’d like one. $5 for an eight oz tub.
CheeseShare comes late Friday. It may or may not be here by pick-up time Friday.
As always, feel free to send in comments, questions, jokes, riddles and brain teasers.