CSA Week 8

This Week’s Harvest

Tomatoes
Globe Eggplant
Summer Squash and Zucchini
Sweet Corn
Garlic
Candy Onions
Celery
Cucumbers
Tendersweet Cabbage
Fennel
Lettuce
Juliet and Sungold Tomatoes (These are making the rounds at the various pick up locations. The Farm got them last week. Oakwood, Kettering, Lexis Nexis and Centerville get them this week. Oregon District will get them next week)

Fruit share: raspberries and blueberries from Berryhill Farm in Xenia   

Farm News

The sun is shinning, the rain has let up, and we are back on track. We have planted tons of vegetables this past week and feel good about the farm’s bounty come fall.  

 Now that we are back into the routine of weekly planting and the rain is behind us, we can assess what we actually lost because of it. The rain affected all 4 of our sweet corn plantings. The first one, which is in this week’s box, didn’t get pollinated. Bees don’t come out in the rain and the corn was at the crucial stage during a wet spell. The result is undeveloped kernels. But we find, and hope you agree, that the kernels that did form have amazing flavor.  The 2nd planting was very young when the deluge started, so it is very stunted and will produce tiny ears. And the 3rd and 4th plantings didn’t get in the ground because it was too wet to plant. That is  over 9000 ears of corn we were counting on having that we will not.  

We were also unable to plant 500 tomato plants. These were to be harvested in September and into October. We will do our best to keep the tomato plantings that did make in the ground healthy. We just started picking off of them and hope to include more in future boxes. 

We also lost plantings of squash, melons, cucumbers, lettuce.  We were unable to plant 3500 sunflower seedlings plus entire successions of most of the flowers we grow!

And things we did manage to plant just suffered from too much rain and have never rebounded. We were unable to weed and side dress with organic fertilizer. This includes kale, cabbage, salad mix, head lettuce, melons, green beans, carrots and beets.  We aren’t sure if our sweet potatoes will pull through or not. Pictured are beds of newly planted crops buried in water. 

 Since the rainy period was 5 weeks long, smack dab in the middle of the season, we will feel the effects for awhile, starting now.  It may seem that the rain is behind us, so all is well, right? But the reality is that we aren’t actually feeling the results of the wet period until now. This is the first year we’ve lost so much and our vegetable offerings will not be as varied as in past years. 

But as I said at the start, we do seem to be turning a corner. As one long time farmer told me “there is lots of the season left”. Now that is dry, we can keep on top of planting, weeding, foliar feeding. For next week’s blog I hope to give positive a progress report on the crops!  

 
Recipes
Cream of Celery Soup ( we used the leftovers for a cream sauce. We added it to sautéed cabbage and rice. Delicious!) 

Roasted Fennel and Eggplant

Corn and Cabbage Coleslaw (use candy onion in place of green onions)

Zucchini Fritters (summer squash works too)