We’ll have the following veggies this to choose from this week:
Lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, arugula, zucchini, tomato, peas, broccoli, kohlrabi, radish, turnip, beets, parsley, dill, basil and green onions. This is probably the last week for arugula, so get it while it’s hot. The cucumbers are just starting to produce close to enough so we’ll probably have them as a choice this week also.
On the farm this week:
Pea season has begun! There’s no one in this picture however, because as soon as I said it’s time to pick the peas I turned around and everyone was gone!
The peas ripen so fast at this time of year that it’s a race to keep up picking them and last week I was getting pretty anxious about how we’d be able to pick them, but then Kelsey put an ad on instagram and recruited a whole posse of pea pickers. We actually had 10 people at the farm on Friday! There are so many people here now that I actually don’t know who works here anymore, and I’ve been trying to figure out who all these people are in the field the last couple days.
I have this tendency to think I took a picture when I didn’t, so I don’t have pictures of anyone this week, but among the new help are: Nicholas, Irina’s Son. He’s pictured below moving sprinklers lines out of the way as we tilled in our first planting of greens and planted more greens and carrots.
We also have another Farmer, Hannah who has her own CSA, ‘elmrock farm’. Whenever we have people helping out that are starting up their own farm I always make sure to do things the wrong way whenever they’re watching and tell them ‘that’s the best way to do this’. Hannah trellised our field tomatoes last week and I actually learned that for the past 10 years I’ve been doing basket weave all wrong!( Unless she’s trying to show me the wrong way to do it also…hmmm) We also had Allegra and Annika who actually picked peas 8 hours straight for 2 days and said they enjoyed it!
Our tomatoes are producing enough to put in the CSA this week. For the past couple years I’ve been experimenting with greenhouse growing in one small greenhouse. The tomatoes seem to be growing better this year than last year.. Right now I’m seriously considering putting up a much larger one so we can grow more of our tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers in for next year bc they’re all doing so well in there.
And finally, here is definitely one of the worst ideas I’ve had. We were running short on space, so I seeded our late summer carrots in our newly tilled in green manure. I thought we’d just flame weed the carrots (burn the weeds with a flame thrower just before the carrots emerge). Except that doesn’t work on grass, and lo and behold, what weeds do we have but a field of grass….It’s a good thing we have 10 people working here now.
Well, that’s it for this week
See you soon,
Jonathan, Sarah, Irina, Kelsey, Hanna, Nicholas, Allegra and Annika