Farm news, Sep 21/2020

We’ll have the following veggies this week:

lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, carrots, onions, beets, potatos, broccoli, tomato, broccoli, squash, melon, leeks, celeriac, turnip, , dill, cilantro, parsley, green onions and hot peppers.

We planted more celeriac this year because people have really seemed to be liking it last year. Celeriac is celery root and is great in soups, shredded or you can make fries with it (that’s what I’d do).

Also, most of the melons are riper than they look and most are ready to eat, but some are still not quite ripe until they start to turn yellow a bit, so if you choose a melon you might want to wait a few days.

On the farm this week:

We had some seriously cold nights last week and the farm looks really different now. Our big green patches where there were squash and potatos just look like big dead fields of brown. But there’s still lots fo green, especially where we planted green manure to protect the soil.

We finished cleaning the onions this week and put them into storage and had some help from the Author Ariel Gordon who hauled 4000 lb of onions out of the greenhouse! We ended up with a lot of onions with soft spots and so they won’t store but are still good to eat. I’m hoping we can entice people to take those onions so we can use them up. We might offer double the onions if you take the ones with soft spots or something like that.

The ground is also really dry now and, I can’t believe it, but we started watering again! After the last big rain and given how cold it was, I was pretty sure we wouldn’t be watering anything again and I had Tristan pull out our spinkler lines. But now it hasn’t rained in a month and has actually been pretty warm – so guess what Tristan got to do this week?

There’ was a lot of hauling things this week as we got all the squash and melons out before the really big frosts. It’s nice to have so much harvested now. It makes harvest days so much easier.

I also decided to take advantage of the dry soil and get some more drainage work done. I’ve been thinking about improving it the drainage for a couple years, and this year after Brandon got 10″ of rain and I thought I better do something before that happens to us. So I had a big swale and a manhole put in the bottom of the field where it has trouble draining. Now hopefully the water will run form the swale into the manhole where we can pump the it into the ditch that runs up the middle of the field.

And I was pretty happy that someone found the giant bean this week and replicated the photo of Kelsey. They told me the just had the one bean for dinner that night. Sam Smith you won a pumpkin!

That’s it for this week.

See you soon!

Jonathan, Sarah, Irina, Kelsey, Mallory, Samantha and Tristan