News from the Farm – September 15, 2012


Well we’re back to dry weather and cool! How nice is that?! Unfortunately I’m having trouble with the irrigation pump. I hope to get to running Wednesday morning, hoping! We’re still trying to clean everything up in the fields. We like to have our winter cover crops sown on or around September 15th, which is Saturday. We’ve got to get drip tape rolled up, pull all the landscape fabric up, mow, disc, spread the seeds, and harrow them in. It’s going to be a busy few days, but at least the weather is cooperating and we should be able to get all done. It will feel great to put many of the fields to bed for the remainder of the season. We’re still harvesting from 4 different fields, but we can probably get the popcorn out early next week as well as the rest of the sweet potatoes.

This week is a little bit of an off week in terms of what’s in the CSA boxes. Often the fields will surprise me and reveal something that I’ve forgotten, but not this week. We were really struggling to get a diversity and quantity in the box this week. I did run up and start forking up some sweet potatoes to add to the boxes. I forked about 25 feet of one bed and got about 85#. As a few of you will notice, some of them are really BIG. They may not be very sweet if you eat them right away. We dug a handful last week and after four days sitting on our kitchen counter they were very sweet and tasty, so maybe save them for mid-week. But if the rest of the beds yield as much as the 25′ I dug up on Tuesday, we’re looking at possibly 1,500# of sweet potatoes. Hurray!