Farm news June 03/2024

We’ll have the following veggies planned this week for CSA:

Lettuce, spinach, radish, bok choi, scallions, arugula, mizuna, carrots, pea shoots

If you’re ever need some ideas of what to do with some of the less familiar vegetables, please take a look under the ‘recipes’ tab of this website: https://jonathansfarm.com/recipes/

This week we have spicy and mild choices. For spicy we have the traditional arugula adds some kick to your salad; or if you prefer less spicy, we have 2 kinds of mizuna – red and green. These have a milder nuttier flavor and are great addition to salads also. Here’s Sarah modeling the arugula and the purple mizuna

On the farm this week:

Someone from the news was calling around last week asking farmers how they were managing with the drought. I wish someone had told me earlier we were in a drought because I assumed that the fact it has rained almost every day this spring meant I didn’t need to water. So now that it’s a drought I’ve been frantically pulling out the sprinklers which are hard to move when the ground is so wet.

Thankfully it stopped raining this morning and we had some beutiful weahter for our first harvest. Here’s everyone harvesting greens this morning:

I feel very fortunate this spring to have everyone working this year returning from last year! It usually takes everyone a couple months after the season is over to start to forget how being bent over all day feels and that’s when I usually ask them to come back and it worked this year!

From left to right we have: Alyssa, Sarah, Tessa, Morgan and Sandra. You will all see Alyssa at the Wolseley market every week at the market table and Alyssa’s mom Barb will be at the CSA table in Wolseley. And Sandra also does all the emails; so a lot of you have talked to her already also. Also missing from this picture are our part timers: Leslie and Emerson.

Other than the non stop rain combined with drought, this spring has been cool and overcast and everything is still growing slower than usual. In fact, we are waiting until tomorrow to harvest the lettuce because we still need it to grow a bit more before we can harvest it. Things definitely feel tight this week.

This spring has also gone by really fast! Now with the spring CSA we’ve been doing we spend 2 days a week harvesting which isn’t a lot of time left for planting and weeding. We actually just finished all our spring planting on Friday! One thing we’re trying to do to improve soil health this year is reduced tilling. Here’s Emerson planting lettuce straight into a winter killed cover crop of oats. The hardest part about this is just being able to make striaght lines and to see the plants. I have not been able to find the lettuce now since we planted it.

That’s it for this week!

See you soon,

Jonathan, Sarah, Sandra, Morgan, Tessa, Alyssa, Emerson, Leslie.