In your box this week: Csa’ers will have a choice from: Lettuce, spinach, carrots, cabbage, broccoli, beans, cucumber, zucchini, peppers, eggplant, beets, turnips, kohlrabi, chard, kale, dill, cilantro, parsley, basil and scallions.
On the farm this week:
We’re starting to harvest 2 new fruit this week: peppers and eggplant. For a garden skill testing question: in which hand is the pepper and which is the eggplant? And for the ultimate skill testing question: which plants in the background are the eggplants and which are the peppers? If you answer correctly you get a free radish.
It also won’t be long until we’re harvesting my favourite fruit: tomatoes! It’s hard to tell in this picture, but that’s Sarah holding up an almost red tomato. We might even have had a ripe tomato by now, but I can never wait until they’re ripe and eat them once they start to turn colour. If I keep eating them faster than they ripen there might not be any tomatoes this year.
Between the rows of tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, zucchini and melons is a now a nicely filled in crop of fall rye. The rye covers the soil and shelters the soil microbes, adds organic matter to the soil, keeps the fruit from touching soil where it can rot and chokes out weeds all at once.
I also tilled in a tall green manure of oats and peas yesterday (pictured below), so the microbes are going to be feasting in this field! A good crop of vegetables generally requires 150lb of nitrogen/acre. Studies in Canada have found that after 2.5 months, a green manure of peas can supply 172lbs/acre of nitrogen – and in a sustainable and natural way!
That’s all for this week. See you soon.
Jonathan, Nicole, Sarah, Kendra.