This week’s farm newsletter with this week’s farm news!
Farm News
In the last newsletter I answered a question about seed saving. One thing I forgot to mention is how we propagate carrots. Like many of our vegetables, carrots propagate sexually which results in one to many seeds which are then planted to grow the next generation. We’ve found another way that is best illustrated with the picture below. Here we see two volunteer carrot couples showing how they make baby carrots. We’ve found this approach, though more time consuming, produces a superior carrot.
A few newsletters ago I briefly discussed my fear that the last planting of corn may not turn out to be what I had hoped. To recap, for the first three plantings of corn we had little to no rain and just one opportunity to put the sprinklers on them. I didn’t expect we’d get great sweet corn out of those plantings with the lack of water plus the second planting was attacked by the birds. So when we received a decent amount of rain prior to harvesting the last corn I was hopeful we’d have a great sweet corn yield. Plus with this variety being my favorite I thought we could hit the corn jackpot. However my hopes were dimmed when I walked through the corn a few weeks ago and noticed that some of the ears were well on their way to becoming ready yet right next to these ears were potentially future ears just beginning to silk. Why is this a problem? Well, how do I put this without the children pestering mom and dad to explain further. Um, the corn had already, um er, it ah, lets just say the dad part of the corn was through for the night. It had already spread all the pollen it could and there just was no more pollen for these just arriving silks. No pollen, no kernels.
I anticipated that there would be some really good corn — the corn where the mom and dad parts of the plant were, shall we say, in sync. There would be some obviously bad corn where there is a cob but no kernels. And then there would be all the ears in the middle where there could be some kernels, there could be many kernels, there could be a few missing kernels or there could be no kernels but still with a decent size cob. Trying to harvest the corn and selecting the really good ears is quite the challenge. The most reliable approach would be to peel back the husks to look at the ears to determine if there is sufficient pollination to warrant handing it out to our members. This would be both time consuming and make for ugly ears, so we ruled that out. Instead we used our sense of touch to feel for full ears. It isn’t totally accurate. It requires great concentration and superior hand sensitivity. We tried our best to get you the best but there were probably a few insufficient cobs that passed through our quality control. Sorry if you were one of these unfortunate members. We will do our best again this week to try to only get those ears that are sufficiently pollinated to provide a first rate sweet corn eating experience.
What will we have this week?
There are a few things that we have a lot of. Lets start with tomatoes. We have a LOT of tomatoes, and soon so will you. Be prepared to either figure out a few good uses for loads of tomatoes or learn to preserve them by canning or freezing. We also have a lot of carrots, though not so many that you won’t be able to eat them before they wilt (a week or two at least!) We also have a lot of potatoes. This week we will be giving out Kennebec potatoes. They are generally larger than other potatoes we grow. They are a good all-purpose potato though they have thin skin and will turn green when exposed to light quicker than other potatoes so — like your children — keep them in the dark. We also have loads of okra! Maybe more like loads and loads of okra. We also have a fair amount of peppers. And of course we have more garlic (it keeps for a long time so don’t think you have to use it all this week). We’ll also have smaller quantities of beans, corn (not sure yet how much), tomatillos, watermelons, just a few eggplants, some cucumbers and a few other odds and ends.
It is also an egg, fruit, mushroom and flower week.
Joke of the Week!
What was the snowman doing in the vegetable patch?
Picking his nose.
That is all for now. Send in your questions, comments, jokes (especially if you want better jokes than the above joke), brain teasers and any other farm or veggie related thoughts.