The strawberries arrived last week. The ground is ready for them. We laid landscape fabric down and planted on Thursday: 2,000 plants! Strawberries always fill us full of optimism this time of year. The prospect of a bumper crop of delicious berries is a wonderful thing to think about. The reality is that they are a lot of work, keeping them watered in the fall, covered for a portion of the winter, and then covered at night during the early spring to keep the frost from killing the blossoms, uncovering the beds during the day so those blossoms can get pollinated, then covering them back up at the end of each day. And when there is a bumper crop it takes so long to harvest all those berries, we get a little sick of them. What a problem to have; too many strawberries! We just try to think about how wonderful they taste.
There are just a couple of spots left open for the CSA extension, let us know ASAP if you’d like 6 more weeks of produce!
There are still a few more time consuming projects going on on the farm: harvesting the last bed of sweet potatoes, continuing to weed the fall crops, and thinning a couple more beds of spinach and beets. We’re hoping to get all that done and really start cleaning the farm up: weeding perennial beds, pruning, mowing, organizing for next season. We head to DoubleTree Farm next Tuesday to process our sorghum into molasses. All the cane is cut and in the bad of our pickup truck waiting to be crushed and boiled down.
Sweet Potatoes: they are in your boxes this week. We had some for lunch on Tuesday. They have good flavor, but they aren’t sweet yet. The starch in the sweet potatoes slowly turns to sugars with time, so if you can wait a week or even two, they will be much sweeter then they are now.
Don’t forget about our CSA FARM PARTY! Sunday, October 6th. From 3-7pm. Please let us know if you’ll be able to attend.