Well, it looks like we’re made it through the worst of heat! We have worked hard to keep hydrated with the heat and humidity, Alex breaking out his wildly popular electrolite elixir at lunch time. The irrigation pump has been working away beautifully all week, and we’ll keep on pumping water through the weekend. Vanessa, the kids, and I went camping up in Virginia over the weekend and even in just those two days the farm has changed. It is the time of year for things to grow quickly and a full moon with warm nights encourages this. The winter squash must have grown about a foot and is starting to vine out. The peppers and eggplant grew from spindly little things to robust plants loaded with blossoms. Alas, the weeds are again attempting to take over some areas of the farm. Really, it is what they are supposed to do, but it doesn’t mean we like it. We spent a large portion of Monday hoeing sweet corn, popcorn and sorghum and still only managed to control just over half the patch! We will overcome, somehow we (almost) always do.
Monday we also pulled up one of the spring planted onion varieties, “Pumba”. There were a lot of them! We were scrambling in the loft of the barn to find room for them all amongst also abundant garlic and potato onions. The garlic harvest was about a month late this year due to the cold winter we think (that winter is still with us). The garlic is also the biggest and best we’ve grown in years but the late harvest does mean there is a space crunch in the barn. We found a place for the onions on some racks that Vanessa built when she first came to the farm but we turned around Tuesday morning and another variety is ready now and the rest aren’t far behind. We’re going to have to get creative trying to fit all our Alliums up in the barn. We dug one of the 18 beds of potatoes Tuesday morning. CSA member, Joy Neaves, guessed the closest in the total yield for that bed. Her estimate of 275# was only a few pounds off, actual weigh in, 278#. It’s great to have potatoes again. We’re a little off this week in that we gave you potatoes, leeks, and garlic. We usually try to alternate weeks, one week with potatoes, the next week with onions and garlic. So we’ll get back to that rhythm soon, but enjoy it all this week!
You may notice that there’s quite a bit of squash and cucumbers in your boxes this week. Well, it’s been a good Spring for them both and we’re passing on some of the bounty. The recipes are both tailored for using a lot of these, the “Squashamole” recipe is a classic, everyone should give it a go!
Nick’s Corner
This past week we’ve been bombarded with alliums galore! Onions, Leeks and Garlic have been coming in out of the field. Although it’s been dry it’s quite nice for pulling Garlic and Onions because when they come out of the ground they are clean, with little dirt stuck to them. The problem is that we’re running out of space in our barn where we dry these delicious little guys. The floor of the barn is completely covered in Garlic almost to the point where it’s hard to navigate. I have a feeling that any late night visits from Dracula will cease. We can all rest assured that Megan will not be seduced by Dracula, remain vegan, and not have strange cravings for meat. Bela Lugosi would definitely have his work cut our for him.
We recently dug our first row of potatoes. It was really cool to see how the plants were producing beautiful red potatoes with a small umbilical cord attaching the plant to it’s swollen roots. We expected the early red potatoes to be somewhat small like most early potatoes, and most of them were. However, there were a few really amazing looking larger potatoes. All I needed was some eyes, ears, a nose and mouth and I could have made myself a Mr. Potato Head right there in the field.
Recently we made a surprising discovery: our Sungold Cherry Tomatoes went missing. They didn’t get up and leave, but somehow we didn’t plant them where we thought. The tomatoes are supposed to be a beautiful shade of orange and taste like heaven. The tomatoes we thought were Sungold’s started to turn a wonderful color red, but we knew something was up. So we went on the lookout for our beloved Sungolds. Come to find out they ended up hiding in a corner of one of the fields with our field tomatoes. Glad we found them though. Those sneaky little guys, running off without telling us.