2024 CSA Newsletter #3
Happy July, folks! I don't know about you, but with my kids on Summer Break, things have ramped up a bit in my household. Lots of big feelings about the end of the school year and looking forward to starting new grades in the fall. They'll be busy with camps, but it is also a time for them to connect to the earth with time spent on the farm.
I know the weather is an early theme this season, and last week was no different. Monday, which is usually our big harvest day was a wild one. After getting all of the greens harvested for the CSA in the morning and soaking in our wash tubs, we lost power just before noon. I wasn't too worried because the temperature was moderate, and we usually weren't without power for too long. Plus, there were plenty of tasks to do to keep my mind busy during the afternoon. I got an update that the estimated restoration was going to be 9 pm. Not ideal, but manageable. Well, 9 came and went and we were still without power. I needed to get all of the washed greens into the walk-in cooler. I had been waiting for the power to return because I was going to need to open the door multiple times to put veggies away. The next update for power restoration was at 2 pm on Tuesday. That wasn't going to work, so I headed out to buy about 100 pounds of ice to put in the cooler to keep things at a reasonable temperature. Thankfully, the power returned around midnight, and we made it through relatively unscathed, but it was a chaotic start to the week.
After the dust settled from Monday's excitement, we settled into a week full of various farm tasks. The students are getting into a groove and are adjusting nicely to the busyness of life on the farm. They were eased into farm work in the spring. Now our lists of tasks are longer than we can complete weekly. A big task accomplished last week was starting to get the tomatoes trellised. That is a huge undertaking because each one of our 700-plus tomato plants has a string dropped for them to use as a trellis. It has been a little slow going because we should have started two weeks ago, but we were in that heat wave and needed to minimize the time spent in our hoophouses. The reason each plant gets a string is because we grow indeterminate types of tomatoes. That means that they will grow as tall as the season allows, usually at least 6-10 feet. After we get them tied and supported, we prune and wrap them, aka sucker and trellis, around the string weekly. We were able to complete the hoophouse with the heirloom tomatoes and will finish the cherry, beefsteak, and sauce tomato hoophouse this week. It's a steep learning curve, but the students have gotten some practice wrapping plants because we are using a similar technique for cucumbers that are growing in the greenhouse this year. Greenhouse cucumbers are new to us, and I am excited to say that there will be cucumbers in the coming weeks. Possibly even next week.
But let's not forecast the coming weeks of the CSA share (although there are lots of goodies on the horizon). Let's talk about the share this week. We are still in the greens-heavy portion of our season. There will be rainbow chard, kale (mostly curly), and lettuce mix this week. Additionally, there will be some romaine heads and hearts as part of the choice. The heat did not make the romaine lettuce happy and there was significant heat stress on some of the heads. We cleaned them up as best as we could but there are some damaged leaves that can be taken care of as soon as you bring them home. There are still carrots and salad turnips part of the choice, as well as garlic scapes and fresh garlic. I had someone ask about the variety. The garlic that was part of the share last week and this week is a hardneck variety named Music. We have two other varieties that will be available later in the season. If you are looking for something new to try with garlic scapes, we made this scape dressing over the weekend. There will be some 4-packs of basil in the "extras" area, and there is the possibility (a low one) of fresh basil from the greenhouse in the share. The students are getting an early jump on the holiday weekend, so I will be solo getting things ready for the pickup. If I don't get to it that will be something new the following week.
I hope you all have a great week!
-Farmer Todd