Seedy Business

How about an announcement or two then on to the real news!

We continue to take the pint size clamshells. Like the ones blueberries come in. Bring them to the pick-up tent or leave them in your delivery tote. We use them for cherry tomatoes.

We might be digging garlic this Friday unless the forecast of multi-day rain is correct. If you want to help let me know. But like I said, the chance is getting slimmer the more rain we have.

What will we have this week?

We’re slowing things down a bit from last week. Only 1 zucchini per share! Still 2 cukes though. Plus eggplant, some kohlrabi, some kale, some cabbage, onions, a bit of okra (seems to be slowing down already), some brocco9li, some broccolini, some snow peas, maybe some green beans, a very few cherry tomatoes (hopefully next week we have lots more!), and some other things I’m forgetting.

It is a flower and shroom week. No other shares.

Farm News

One of the most frustrating parts of farming is a human created problem. When we started farming a couple of decades ago we didn’t have a clue as to which varieties of plants to grow in our climate, with our soils and the types of pests and diseases prevalent in our area. Seed catalogs can be somewhat helpful with descriptions of interesting or unique disease resistance. Some may even list disease resistance, like “Intermediate resistance to fusarium” or some such thing. Other catalogs have far less descriptions of their products, e.g. “Good package”. Do I want a vegetable with a good package? I don’t know. Sounds dirty to me.

So we’ve trialed a bunch of different plants over the years and found varieties that work well for us. One plant that was challenging to find a good variety was cauliflower. We tried quite a few different varieties over the years. For a while we grew a variety called Fremont. It was expensive but it seemed to work ok. Then it was discontinued. So we started to look for another variety and stumbled upon one called Candid Charm. It worked far better than Fremont and was cheaper. YeeHaw! Sometimes being forced to make a change is beneficial.

So we’ve been growing Candid Charm for many year until two years ago when it suddenly became unavailable. Argh! The suggested replacement was a new variety called Twister. It’s claim to fame was the leaves twisted around the head to provide shade which keeps the hear nicely blanched (white). Typically farmers would rubber band together the leave of cauliflower to blanch the head to get a nice white head. We occasionally did this but if the weather was damp the heads would never dry and a disease would rot the head. So having twisted leaves could be beneficial but maybe not depending on how wet the weather is.

So we grew twister last season and we were not impressed. The plants didn’t grow well here for some reason. We had some left over seeds of Candid Charm from the previous season that did well so we didn’t feel it was the season that made twister unsuccessful. But we felt we couldn’t just use one season to evaluate a new seed so we tried growing it again this season. It is not living up to Candid Charm’s potential. So our cauliflower this season may be worse than last season — unless something suddenly changes.

What do we do for next season? I don’t know. I guess we will have to evaluate a few more varieties. I don’t see seed companies reintroducing old seeds anytime soon. But I guess we can hope.

Another similar situation occurred with our cucumbers. We grew many different varieties over the years and again found one that performed really well for us — Speedway. We’ve grown it for more than ten years with great success. Then two years ago or maybe more, I don’t recall, the seed company did not provide untreated Speedway seeds. We could only buy seeds with a chemical treatment but we don’t do that so we were stuck trying something else. We did not have great success with the replacement. It was middling at best. The good news is that unlike Candid Charm, Speedway was not discontinued. It just wasn’t available in an untreated state. This season we were able to purchase untreated seeds so we bought a lot of them. And what was the result? All you have to do is look at your shares this past week and this week. We have cucumbers coming our of our ears! Sure it could be weather related but it seems the Speedway seed just do better for us.

One final example is our butternut squash. Back before 2009 we grew a butternut squash called “Early Butternut”. It worked well for us. Then in 2009 it became unavailable. So we switched to Butternut Supreme. I don;t recall it having any supremacy over the Early Butternut but it seemed to work well enough for us to continue using it until 2017 when it was discontinued. We then tried Avalon and have used it ever since. Is it the best? I don’t know. But I do know having to constantly change varieties due to the whims of seed companies is frustrating. Plus, if they would tell us something is being discontinued a year or two in advance we could start trialing a bunch of replacements to find one that works. Trialing new varieties when you don’t have your standard variety to compare it to isn’t very helpful. Every season has different factors that could influence the seed’s success. Without a standard to compare it to we only know how well the new seed performs in the particular situation we tried it. And if the new varieties don’t perform as well as we’d like we end up short of what we were planning.

So, if any seed companies read my blog — and I have to believe only the best and smartest seed companies do — please, please, please give us a few year’s notice if you are going to discontinue a product. Give us time to find a replacement. And before you discontinue the variety, grown a whole bunch of seed so we can stock up for the next few years until we find a suitable replacement. Is that really too much to ask?

tl:dr Our cauliflower isn’t the best this year.

Recipes of the Week

Here are a couple of eggplant recipes to prove that eggplant is actually quite delicious!

Joke of the Week

Did you hear about the new Arnold Schwarzenegger movie? He plays a farmer. It’s call Germinator.