Hello everyone. This week Csa’ers will be choosing from the following:
Onion, cabbage(full shares), cucumbers, zucchini, beans, chard, kale, broccoli, beets, carrots, potatoes, corn, eggplant peppers, dill, parsley, cilantro and scallions.
Once again, it is just a bit of corn right now, possibly just for full shares, but the major planting is very close to being ready, and we will be possibly starting the big harvest Thursday. If not, there will definitely be lots of corn for next week.
We’ve been harvesting the lettuce small and bunching it because it’s been quick to bolt in the recent weather, but now that the weather is cooling down we are going to probably have one week off lettuce to let it grow a bigger and start with lettuce again next week.
On the Farm this week:
The most exciting news is that we finished planting this week! It’s a nice break to be able to leave for a whole day now and not have to worry about watering the greenhouse. We have been rotating taking fridays off to do laundry and errands in the city, but now if you want to find us on fridays, better to look on a patio somewhere because we won’t be at the farm! This week we planted our last 1200 heads of lettuce, and here I am doing a victory lap with the seeder seeding spinach for the fall. ( Try not to look at all the weeds).
This week we also found downy mildew on the zucchinis which is a real pain in the butt! So we pulled out the infected plants and sprayed all the zucchini and cucumber foliage with a prophylactic concoction I came up and which seems to have worked well in the past. It’s a mixture of calcium (fungi cannot penetrate foliage sufficient in calcium), kelp (has lots of micronutrients to boost plant health), copper (a natural fungicide that plants use and it’s the one nutrient our soil has tested be low in), and phosphorous (I just threw this in because phosphorous is essential for good fruit quality). Hopefully this will keep the plants healthy until frost comes and gives us our long awaited excuse to stop picking those darn itchy zucchinis plants.
Other than that, I didn’t seem to take any pictures this week, so here’s a picture from inside the corn (which is much taller than me) to prove that it’s on the way.
Other things on the way are tomatoes and peppers. The Tomato rows are spotted red throughout, so it won’t be much longer -sorry it’s taken this long!
At the market this week:
On Tuesday Interlake meadows will be selling their grassfed beef, and the Watersong farms will be back on Thursdays.
Anna Wiere will be giving a workshop on composting toilets at 5 pm on Thursday Aug 16th. The workshop will be a thought provoking look at how we deal with waste and give you simple ideas for your own home composting toilet.
That’s it for this week.
See you soon,
Jonathan, Nicole, Kitana