Farm News, July 17/2023

We’ll have choices from the following veggies this week for CSA: Lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, carrots, beets, zucchini, cucumber, broccoli, kohlrabi, onions, dill, cilantro, parsley, basil, green onion and garlic scapes.

On the farm this week:

The weather keeps getting colder and colder! I’m wondering : is it bad to turn my heat on in July? But even though it’s cold I’d rather it be 15 degress than 30 – so I’m happy!

This week we finally have cucumbers! You might have been wondering ‘where are the cucumbers?’ the last couple weeks. Well I’ve been wondering the same thing. Our cucumbers have been blooming for a long time now, but producing almost entirely male flowers. Usually the first 20 or so flowers are male, but this year is seems like the first 10 000 flowers were male. I usually plant a mix of gynoecious (all female flowers) and monoecious cucumbers (both male and female). We’ve only been able to pick from they gynoecious cucumbers for the last couple weeks. Because of this, last week we actually planted a whole extra row cucumbers. I realize this doesn’t not actually make any sense as it seems all our cucumbers are producing now is over and the ones we just planted won’t be ready until September anyways, but I often do things that don’t make sense when I’m nervous. Here’s everyone picking cucumbers.

Also – since we’ve got cucumbers this week, we have to pair them with sweet onions, because you can’t make a cucumber salad without sweet onions

Here’s everyone cleaning onions in the onion patch. Sometimes people see all the grass growing in our pathways and say – yikes you’ve got a lot of weeds! That’s actually winter rye that we plant in between the rows in a lot of our transplanted crops to help protect and feed the soil. Only about half the fields are crops and the other half are pathways – so it’s a lot of soil to leave bare all summer long.

That’s it for this week. See you soon!

Jonathan, Sarah, Irina, Sandra, Tessa, Morgan, Alyssa and Emerson.