A few quick announcements then on to the important stuff!
We have a great volunteer opportunity that I am sure many of you would like to take advantage of. We are in need of as many people as we can get to help process the garlic. How does one process garlic? It is quite simple. You take the garlic by the stem, hold it over the appropriate box and cut off the bulb into the box. We can supply everything you need. Clippers, boxes, chairs, shade and garlic! All you need to provide is your time and grip strength. We’ll take as much time as you have available. Have an hour to kill before picking up your produce? How about processing some garlic? Need to be in Woodbury by 7:00 and it is only 5:00? Stick around after you grab your produce and process some garlic! Like to listen to the Twins game on the radio? Bring out your radio and process some garlic! You can sit in the shade the whole time! Armchair farming! If you are by yourself you don’t have to wear a mask. If there is more than one person you can feel free to socially distance and not have to wear a mask. We have plenty of shade for saying apart! Let me know if you’d like to help out and when you’ll be around. Daylight hours preferred.
One thing I failed to mention in last week’s newsletter about tomatoes (at least I think I forgot) is that we grow a lot of different colored tomatoes. Some red, some yellow, some green, some multi-colored. The point is that you can’t tell if they are ripe by what color the tomato is. It could be ripe when it is green! The way to tell how ripe a tomato is is (I always think of President Clinton when I write “is is”) by gently squeezing it to judge how soft or firm it is. The softer the tomato the riper it is. Don’t squeeze too hard or you could bruise it.
We are still looking for an employee or two to replace those of us who value education over experience. If you are interested or know someone who is interested have the interested person (either you or the person you think is interested) contact me as soon as possible!
We grow a range of hot peppers every year — from Anaheims to Carolina Reapers. For those who pick-up their produce from a drop site we typically give you only the milder peppers, e.g jalapenos. We don’t have a lot of the hotter peppers and we value your safety so we feel it is better to not give you something harmful if you don’t want it. However if you would like the hotter peppers please send me an email and we can include the hotter ones when we have them. Let me know the level of hotness you’d like.
Now on to this week’s news!
Last Week’s Challenges
Let’s start with rain. On the rain front we’ve had quite a few near misses this past week. Sunday night sounded very promising. I heard the thunder off in the distance. The radar showed some large yellow blobs of rain heading our way. By 2:00 Monday morning the dogs woke me up (they don’t like thunder) so with nothing better to do I looked at the radar. Seemed even more promising! Lots of red and yellow in the twin cities heading east toward our location. “Finally”, I thought, “Here comes the rain!” Oops. Celebrated too soon. When I awoke later that morning I didn’t recall hearing any rain. I looked outside and didn’t see much evidence of rain. So I replayed the radar on KSTP’s web site and the red and yellow blobs dancing across the cities broke up to head north, head south or head both north and south. That whole evening of thunder resulted in less rain here than we can measure Arg! I can only surmise that all of you who left your car windows open to increase the likelihood of rain somehow sucked the rain away from the farm and into your drivers-side window. Next time I’ll need to be more specific about leaving your car windows open and your car here on the farm. Anyway, we continue to irrigate.
The corn puzzles me this year. We’ve had corn puzzling situations in the past like the year the corn fermented on the plant. That was a wild summer! Yee haw! But this year’s puzzlement is more puzzling. Before I get to the puzzle let me give you a little sweet corn background. Sweet corn lends itself very well to automation/mechanization. The large sweet corn growers plant the corn using a planter. No humans touch the seeds. They then cultivate or spray to eliminate weeds (Roundup Ready sweet corn is a few years old so if you want to avoid it be sure to seek out organic sweet corn). Again, no human hands. Then all the corn matures at the same time which allows the last step — the harvesting — to utilize a corn harvester to harvest it. Again no human hands touching the corn.
Why does this work so well? Because as I said, “All the corn matures at the same time.” Unlike tomatoes or peppers or cucumbers or just about any other vegetable crop where the person who harvests the crop has to decide whether the particular vegetable she is about to harvest is in fact ready to harvest — is it big enough? is it ripe enough? is it the right color? etc. — sweet corn ripens all at about the same time give or take a couple of days. This doesn’t mean it has to be harvested all at that time. Varieties of corn have variable times in which they “can hold in the field”. This is the amount of time the corn can stay on the plant while edible and not become over mature. Some corn can hold for a week. Some only a few days. And some can hold for more than a week. But in all these cases all the corn for the most part is continuing to mature at approximately the same rate.
Now here is the first part of the puzzle. Two varieties of corn we planted have ears that are ripe right next to ears that are just starting to silk. Silking is the second step in creating the kernels. The pollen from the tassels — the sticky-uppy things on the top of the corn plant which is the first step of the kernel creation process — falls down onto the silks where it is transported into the husk to form the seeds, which is what we eat. Typically most of the corn stalks of a given planting and variety will tassel at the same time and silk at the same time — again give or take a few days. This way pollen from different plants is available for all the silking going on. It makes the pollination process efficient.
But as I said, the plants in two of our plantings are not all silking at the same time. This results in two possible things: 1) the ears don’t mature at the same time or 2) there is not sufficient pollen left for the later silkers resulting in an unpollinated ear of what could have been sweet corn. The earlier of the two planting we see many stalks with result number two — ears of no or missing corn. Not good. The later planting we aren’t sure yet what will happen. But if we get result number one which isn’t too bad we’ll have to selectively harvest the corn over several weeks. This is fine for us since we don’t have a mechanical corn picker but it takes longer, there is more chance for error and training is difficult. It takes some experience to determine if a given ear of corn is mature without taking a bite out of it. We could use the bite each ear of corn method but in past surveys members have expressed their desire for unsampled corn. So we train.
Anyway, I can’t recall having this happen in the past but I’m sure it has. I don’t know the reason but could guess at a couple of things the first being the lack of rain these last few weeks. Corn is one of the few crops we are unable to irrigate. Actually we can irrigate it when it is short, but once it has tasseled and elongated it is too tall for our sprinklers to provide water. So I’m going with the lack of water as the primary culprit.
What will we have this week?
Well we are slowing things down a little bit this week. We were counting on beans and corn to be part of this week’s share. There is corn though less than we planned. The beans aren’t ready yet but may be by the end of the week. What we will have is tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, summer squash, onions, eggplants (they seem to be slowing down), some cabbage, carrots, some okra, some sweet corn and a few other things.
CoffeeShare and FlowerShare this week. No FruitShare or EggShare.
That is all for now. Let me know if you have any questions, comments, jokes, etc.