Farm News
I may have been a bit rash in my analysis of what was eating our lettuce, beets, chard and other veggies. Based on my observations of what appeared to be deer hoof prints poked through the plastic mulch I immediately assumed it must be deer. It is only logical, right? Well, let me be the first to apologize to the deer community. You see as I was walking past the deer “fence” I saw a rabbit hiding in the tall weeds. As I approached he, or of course she, ran through the deer “fence”, scrabbled past the lettuce, hopped over the fennel, scampered through the beets and exited out the other side of the deer “fence” then disappeared into the weeds surrounding the pasture. So perhaps I was a bit hasty in my judgement. It may have in fact been bunnies and not deer. The only remaining question is where did the rabbits get those cute little boots with deer hoof print soles? Especially in their size? I can only assume Amazon because if I were looking for them that is where I would start.
Speaking of deer, since they were no longer able to consume our delicious chard and tender beets (the chard is recuperating nicely and will hopefully continue to provide ever increasing bunches of chard, I’m not so sure of the future of the beets) they have broadened their palates to include new tasty morsels like sunflowers and string beans. Is there nothing these monsters won’t eat? We may have to dome the whole farm to survive the onslaught. Either that or grow less tasty food. They’ve also topped some of the peppers earlier this spring, lopped off a few eggplant stems, and sampled the okra before deciding they weren’t to their liking. I suppose we could do a pure okra CSA. We need more people to order the VenisonShare!
On a related topic, in the last newsletter I briefly mentioned the hail we got on the prior Sunday. I had written a lot of the newsletter the Saturday before so didn’t have much time to discuss the hail. I also at the time didn’t think it was worth more than a mention. The hail was brief, maybe a minute and a half. It was in hindsight kinda big — just shy of dime size. So maybe I should have been more irritated. As the week went on and there was a bit more time to look closely at the plants it was quite obvious the hail was pretty damaging. Not end of the farm damaging or even end of the season damaging. More like, I’m glad I’m not a plant with big leaves damaging. A lot of the squash leaves are holey. Same with the chard and eggplants. Many of the zucchini fruits are spotted. Thankfully these are all plants that will grow out of the holey problems. And most of the smaller leaved plants had little to no damage. The tomatoes with fruit on them are inside the hoop house and were protected. The eggplant fruits weren’t yet big so they look fine. The sunflower leaves are holey but the plants are alive and well (except for the ones beheaded by the deer). I haven’t seen a lot of damage on the corn leaves so they made it through fine. Overall it wasn’t as bad as it could be later in the summer when there is more fruit ripening and less time for the plants to grow out of it but it was worse than I originally thought. Too bad deer aren’t made of large leaves.
What will we have this week?
The salad mix is doing well so everyone will get salad mix! We also have plenty of green onions. Then we have all the other things that aren’t in sufficient quantities for everyone. Things like chard, kale, garlic scapes, green garlic, snow peas, snap peas, summer squash/zucchini, eggplants, basil, broccoli, bok choi and probably a few odds and ends.
We have JamShare and the special order blueberries this week. There are also small flower bouquets for FlowerShare!
That is all for now. Feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions and anything else you feel will be valuable to the farm!