We’ll have choices form the following veggies for CSA this week:
Lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, broccoli, broccolini, beans, cucumber, zucchini, potato, carrots, beets, onion, beans, dill, parsley, basil, cilantro, green onion
On the farm this week:
The war is over with the potato beetles.. and we lost. The good news is that at least we don’t have to keep fighting! Even with the tractor driven potat swatter we were spending several hours a week swatting beetles into buckets. But the potatos have died off early this year – by last week there were no living plants left to save from beetles. ( I’m actually wondering if swatting the plants as much as we did had something to do with it) We also have no more yield to gain by not digging them up; so we are started digging up the potatos this week. Despite losing a few weeks of growth this summer, our yield is not as bad as I would have expected and we still will have a good amount of potatos for the rest of summer and winter. Here’s Adriian looking back down the never ending row and still wondering how he ended up here.
Sometimes when people see our fields they remark – wow look at those weeds! Actually, between each row of potato we plant cover crop of italian rye grass, phacelai, rape, clover, and peas. I usually spend all winter listening to too many podcasts about how bad it for microbiome to have bare soil and it’s gotten to the point that I somethings feel like I spend more time planting the pathways then the crops between them.
We also use cover crops to build the soil whenever there is no vegetable crop planted. But I started thinking = why not try to grow them both at the same time. So now a lot of our crops look like these beans which are grown in a crop of cereal rye, phacelia, rape and phacelia
And we don’t usually grow corn, but I decided to add corn into our cover crop: here is our cover crop of: vetch, winter rye, clover, sunflower, phacelia and sweet corn. I gave up on sweet corn years ago because of the worms, and I’m afraid to say they’re back. We did not plan this as part of the CSA, but will add in what we have as a choice; but please be warned- we do not use pesticides so there will be worm
Here’s Sarah in the corn cover crop.
That’s it for this week. Thanks and see you soon!
Jonathan, Sarah, Sandra, Alyssa, Shola, Barb, Adriian, Hin and Kateryna