Zukes!

Announcements:

A quick reminder for drop site picker-uppers: When you pick up your items from your drop site, if you find something amiss, say an item you expected is not at the drop site, please contact me as soon as possible and preferably while still at the drop site. The best way is to text me at 651-436-2778 and include who you are — I don’t have most people’s phone number in my phone — and a short description of the issue. Since pick-up time at drop sites overlaps with pick-up time here at the farm I may not answer a call but usually can grab a text message. I’ll give you a call or text back as soon as I can so that we can resolve the issue promptly.

I updated some of the product listing in our store to reflect prorated prices for the remainder of the season. If you decide you want to order any of our shares — even veggie shares for those still contemplating joining the farm — you can place your order on our store. If the item you want does not have a prorated price just email me and I will update the item. So far I’ve updated those items someone asked to order.

Another reminder to let me know if you are interested in organic vanilla from a local supplier. See last week’s newsletter announcements for more details.

What will we have this week?

Zucchini! Some eggplants, cucumbers, green onions, some garlic scapes, some broccoli, some snap peas, some snow peas, some shelling peas, pickling cukes, some chard, maybe kale, lettuce and I suppose some other things I’m not recalling at the moment.

It is a ‘Shroom and Flower week! No fruits, eggs, cheese or coffee.

Farm News

I woke up early this past Saturday. Far earlier than I was intending — thanks Link. Just because the sun is up doesn’t mean we need to be too Link. Saturdays are for sleeping in Link. Understand? Anyway, as I groggily got dressed to take the dog out I was treated to a pleasant noise. A light patter. The sound of rain on the roof. On a Saturday! Yoo-hoo! I get a day off! What a joyous feeling. And then reality struck. It’s zucchini season. Ugh. No days off during zucchini season.

Unlike most of you office workers, I like having rainy Saturdays. During the week when the crew is here we work in all types of weather. Rain, sleet, heat, cold, everything including that one time we heard the tornado sirens but since it was a Wednesday we thought it was the usual monthly test of the Emergency Broadcast System so we kept working. The strong gust of wind should have given us another clue. But there was work to be done so onward ho!

With this schedule I find rainy Saturdays to be quite enjoyable. We don’t have workers here on the weekend. If I feel like it and the weather is favorable I’ll do some of the things that require only one person, say cultivating or mowing. But if it is raining or too hot maybe, I’ll stay inside and write a newsletter, or sleep in (except now that we have Link that seems to be impossible. He’s such a go-getter!) But as I said, once the zucchinis start to mature it is an every day event — much like milking cows but only once per day and far less mooing. If we skip a day of zucchini picking we find the zucchinis keep growing and pretty soon we have baseball bat size zucchinis — fine for on-farm pick-up but a bear to fit into a delivery tote.

So no more days off for Farmer Chris. Thankfully zucchini harvest isn’t a full day event. Maybe a couple hours during the peak of the season. Zucchini harvest is an easy task when you have many people helping out. It becomes a bit of a slog when you are alone, and its raining, and the mud is sticking to your boots, and you discover your boots have a hole where there wasn’t a hole previously. It is a test of wills. Me against the zucchini. And in this weekend’s case, me against that damn rain, too.

And let us not forget that zucchini plants fight back. Zucchini plants have sharp spines on their stems that scratch your hands and arms as you harvest them. It’s like they are protecting their precious zucchini children from the evil ogre lopping them off the mother plant. Now one could wear a long sleeved shirt and gloves — they should be soft gloves so you don’t scratch the skin of the zucchini — but to do that one would have to not been woken up at 5:00 am by the pitter-patter of the feet of a usually funny but not so funny at 5:00 in the morning dog who wanted to get the day going despite it having been the day after the US holiday known as Independence Day.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, zucchini. For those unfamiliar with the zucchini plants, they start out small, like the size of a zucchini seed since we start them from seed. But over time they grow to fairly large plants. Large enough that only Carl Lewis and a few other long jumpers are able to leap over. In most seasons, a few of the zucchini plants don’t make it so we typically have a few empty zucchini spots we can use to traverse between the three beds of zucchini plants. This year, for better or worse, all our plants survived the transplant so we do not have a nice spot for getting from one aisle to another. This just adds another level of difficulty to our routine. I’ve always wondered if Carl Lewis lived on a zucchini farm. That would explain a lot.

One final comment on zucchini. Zucchini is part of the summer squash family and this season it is the only summer squash we are growing. None of that yellow bulbous summer squash we’ve grown in the past. Just straight, cylindrical summer squash for us. And for those who can’t tell the difference between the two zucchinis we are growing I created this handy, dandy guide. Hopefully it will help you know which ones you have.

That’s pretty much it for this week’s zucchini talk. Now on to what you can do with zucchini.

Recipes

Joke of the Week

What is a zucchini’s favorite sport?

Squash

As always, send in comments, questions, jokes, or anything else that could be perceived as valuable.