Since this is the start of the harvest season we have so much to do we can’t waste time. So this newsletter will not contain any of that usual funny business. Ok, maybe a little funny business but mostly business. But first the usual announcements.
The season starts this week. Plan to pick up your produce at your usual pick-up location.
Let me know if you need to move or cancel your pick-up for the week of July Fourth or frankly any other week.
For FruitShare people: I need to know at least a week in advance if you plan to change your pick-up day. Since we order fruit specifically for the day you pick up — that way you get the freshest fruit possible — we don’t have as much flexibility to rearrange pick-ups. So if you ordered FruitShare and want to change your usual pick-up day you need to let us know the week prior.
We still have share available so keep spreading the word. We can prorate the shares if someone starts after this week.
Farm News
This week we added yet another task to our never ending list of task. You know the list I’m talking about: planting, hoeing, cultivating, hand weeding, pest management, deer fence maintenance, etc. This week we added harvesting to the list. Oh, and washing produce. Wait, also packing produce and delivering produce. So many new tasks. Aaaahhhh!
And of course last Friday when we thought we’d have our last “leisure” workday, a water valve in the packing shed broke and flooded the shed with I don’t know how much water. It could have been running all night as far as I know. What a mess. We may have been the main cause of the high humidity this past weekend!
A quick note about the radishes. We found a few radishes that were hollow inside. On the outside they looked perfectly normal. But not the inside. Odd. My first inclination was to have our QA department take a bite out of each radish and toss the hollow ones. Then I thought maybe destructive testing of produce wasn’t the best choice. So we believe we figured out which ones were hollow because they were just a bit squishy. We did our best to use our test to remove the squishy ones. If you find a hollow radish or two or three they seem perfectly fine to eat — if you like radishes — but let me know so that I can track how pervasive the problem is. It seemed to be only the french breakfast radishes I’m guessing the cause was the fluctuating temps this spring.
One last item. In looking at last season’s notebook where we track all that we harvest I noticed we are about two weeks behind last season. For example we started the week of June 17th last season and already had zucchini. Not so this season though it could be a spectacular zucchini season. I don’t know why it is so much later this year. Late Spring I guess? But I thought last season had a late Spring as well. Nonetheless, we will still have plenty of time this year to eat plenty of produce. Speaking of which:
What will we have this week?
This is the section where I attempt to outline all the things we will harvest and give out this week. It is never comprehensive. It seems to be frequently wrong. But someone one time long ago asked me to include it in the newsletter so here it is. Just one more benefit of being a member of the farm. You get to influence what we do!
Why is it “frequently wrong you” ask? Well, because plants have a mind of their own. I write the newsletter sometime during the previous weekend or as late as Tuesday morning. If writing it on the weekend I have to speculate what we will be getting in three to five days. Seems like it should be easy but it isn’t. I can’t tell how many zucchinis will be ready until we go look at every zucchini plant, and we might as well wait until harvest day to look at every plant. I may think the kale looks great but when we actually go to harvest we find out it has more holes that we expected. We may believe there is a lot of lettuce on Saturday but then so did the rabbits.
If I am writing this on Tuesday I have a bit more accuracy — especially for the Tuesday pick-up. But by Thursday or Friday the situation may have changed dramatically. We may have thought there would be another 100 bunches of radishes by Thursday but we only found 25. All those tomatoes we expected to ripen with the hot weather seemed to slow down because the weather was cooler than forecasted. Anyway, you get the picture.
I should also mention that the items in the list do not necessarily reflect what you will get in your delivered share nor what you may find in the pick-up tent for on-farm pick-up. Not all the items have enough for all the members so we put those items that are fewer than necessary into a group and distribute them as a group. We may have enough chard to give to the delivery folks but not for the on-farm folks so this week will send it out to delivery and next week keep it in the pick-up tent. We track everything we give out so that we can distribute items equitably over the course of the season. We put a lot of effort into this aspect of the CSA — probably more than most members would require — but we want everyone to get equal access to the eggplants, daikon radishes and okra..
I do my best to relay what we expect to have this week and you can choose what you do with the information. I suspect most people ignore it much like the rest of the newsletter. So feel free to join the crowd! Now on to my best guess:
We will have lots of bok choy, lots of green onions, lots of green garlic, many bunches of radishes, some kale, some chard, and a few odds and a couple of ends. The odds and ends are items that at this time of the year haven’t started really producing but we need the produce to go somewhere so we give it out.
This week is a CoffeeShare and ‘ShroomShare week. ‘Shrooms are black poplar with a side of reishi brownies. No flowers, eggs, cheese, or fruit this week.
Joke of the Week
Why don’t chicken coops have four doors? If they had four doors they’d be a chicken sedan. (You can thank member and volunteer Kamal for this joke).
As always, feel free to send in comments, questions, jokes, orders or anything else you think I should know.