This Week’s Harvest
Red cabbage or Tendersweet cabbage
Carrots
Candy onions
Fennel bulb
Cucumbers
Zucchini and summer squash
Green leaf lettuce
CSA Event!
CSA Farm Tour Thursday 7/10 at 7pm
Farm News
CSA members who have been with us awhile are probably just as excited about carrots this week as we are. That is because we haven’t had a successful crop since June of 2011. Carrots are difficult to grow mainly because they are sown directly in the ground instead of started in the greenhouse. We don’t have the control that we have in the greenhouse. Out in the field, It could easily get too dry, too wet, or too hot for carrots to germinate. We have never gotten good germination once temperatures hit 80. So that leaves us with just a possible spring sowing. In the past, in the spring, we’ve gotten decent germination, but that only brings us to the next problem with directly sown crops: weed pressure. In the greenhouse our starts get a jump on the weeds. They are nice and big when they get transplanted into the freshly tilled beds giving them a nice head start. Carrots, on the other hand start at the same time as the weeds and they grow a LOT slower. When it is time to weed the carrots ( which need to happen several times over the course of its life) it is also time to harvest, plant, weed other things, fertilize the crops, go to market…you get the picture! So often times the carrots end up getting lost in a forest of weeds. This year we managed (barely) to weed one of the carrot beds- which translates to enough for 2 weeks of CSA boxes. While we wish it could be more, we are happy with this small triumph and have learned a lot about carrots to improve growing and harvesting them in the future. So we’ll take it and advise you to savor your carrots this week!
Recipe Ideas
Cucumber and sweet onion salad ( candy onions and cucumbers are a wonderful pair. This time of year we consume lots of cucumber salads and cucumber sandwiches)