In your share this week:
- Carrots
- Salad Mix
- Onions
- Leeks
- Beets (some are getting golden, others red)
- Tomatoes
- Hungarian Wax Peppers
- A few cloves of German Extra Hardy Garlic left over from planting
- Yukon Gold Potatoes
- Zucchini
- Italian Parsley
- Fennel
Please be understanding when some of your produce isn't as perfectly clean as you are used to. Our harvest mornings are very cold which makes washing produce quite difficult, painful even. We do most of the dirt removal, but are leaving some of the final cleaning now to you. (Except for the salad. We are still spending extra time on the salad. Because we like you.) You will also notice some produce is looking a little less than ideal. That's because it's almost the end of OCTOBER. Let's face it, some things are showing signs of the snow and rain we've received, or from the hard freezes we get at night. It's not summer anymore that's for sure.
Our big garlic planting project was the main focus of this past week. We started breaking up the garlic on Wednesday afternoon and finished planting all our rows by about noon on Saturday. *Huge Sigh* We planted 11 rows in total, each about 200 feet long. That's a lot of garlic. Enough for our 2012 CSA shares, to sell, and with enough to re-plant for 2013. We plan on mulching the long rows this week with a loose layer of straw. We did this last year as an extra precaution to protect our expensive investment in new, healthy seed stock. We are quite pleased with the results of this years crop and don't dare do it any differently, just in case.
This year's garlic planting was particularly challenging because we are very limited to where it can be planted. As I've mentioned before, our past crops of garlic were affected by a virus which finally took a fatal toll in 2010. This virus remains in the soil of where the garlic was grown and will remain there for many years. Only time and aggressive cover cropping will cleanse the virus from the soil. (We can plant other crops there, just not garlic.) There is only one section of the farm where we haven't ever planted garlic. It is the newest of all our fields. The least prepared field. The back field with the most rocks, weeds, and compacted soil. Not a good combination, but its what we have. The garlic will grow fine, it will just be extra work from last weekends planting stage to next year's harvest. And yeah, a lot of weeding. And all because WE LOVE GARLIC.
We are moving into clean up mode here on the farm. It is our goal to have greenhouse 2 cleaned out by the end of the week. Then moving onto another, and another. We are also walking through feilds, pulling up dead plants and drip tape, gathering garden staples, etc. The pigs are enjoying extra piles of old crops and turning them into a heaping pile of compost.
We have two other BIG projects in the works. First, the guys have started building our newest greenhouse. It will be another hoop house just like the style we put into use this past season. Because of it's location it will be known as greenhouse 4 and we'll be renumbering all our greenhouses, again. The other project is that we will be putting new plastic over greehouses 1 & 2. Greenhouse 1 was our very first greenhouse. It is 10 years old and still has it's original plastic covering. These buildings have been through a lot over the years, including: our own mistakes or carelessness (we'll just call it our "learning curve"), windstorms, mishaps with tractors, and a severe hail storm which put thousands of small dents in the plastic that are still visible these many years later on a sunny day. We hope all these projects go smoothly and that the weather holds out so it call all get done.
One week to go. Next week, Tuesday, October 25th will be our last CSA delivery of the 2011 season.
Have a great week and ENJOY your veggies.
Tara
Posted by: |