Hello Everyone,
Happy Labor Day! I hope you enjoyed the long weekend. For us, I’m afraid it’s just another day of labor; there are plants to be set out, weeds to snuff out and harvesting to be done. We are still experiencing very dry conditions here at the farm. The storms that passed through last Sunday and Monday missed us and we got no more than 10 minutes of drizzle. We’ve been busy moving the sprinklers around the fields again. We have a few days of scattered storms predicted for this week, so hopefully they won’t all pass us by again.
We are still experiencing a dearth of cooking greens. The kale and chard is recovering from being overcut rather slowly due to the dry conditions. We should be able to harvest these crops again by next week. The arugula and other mustard greens are growing nicely but are still several weeks from attaining harvestable size. We have bok choy that will be ready in 2 weeks and the first fall broccoli crop should begin to head up in the next 2-3 weeks. The spinach has come up nicely and we should have spinach in about a month. We are heavy on lettuce at the moment so we will be shipping 2 heads in the shares this week. The final planting of summer squash should begin to yield next week. In the meantime we continue to pick smaller quantities from the 2nd planting. Some groups received squash last week; those that did not should get some this week. We ran out of watermelons at the end of last week due to extensive deer damage. We are still bringing in a few, but production has slowed way down. We will try to correct this inequity over the next 2 weeks. We are still gathering ground cherries although we have had some problems with splitting and with green fruit mixed in. We have not included any in the shares because while some of you love them, many do not. I normally offer them as a choice with cherry tomatoes, but these are scarce. We will be sending ground cherries as an extra this week as well as their close cousin- tomatillos and hot peppers.
The share for this week will be: Lettuce (2), tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, red skin potatoes, leeks, beans, beets, choice of parsley or basil and summer squash for some.
Enjoy!
Farmer John