This Week’s Harvest
Salad Mix
Green Beans OR Dragon Tongue Beans
Garlic
Red Leaf Lettuce
Summer Squash and Zucchini
Cabbage
Broccoli OR Cauliflower
Bell Peppers
Striped German Tomato
Okra (Oregon District only)
Farm News
Save the Date!
Our fall CSA member potluck will be held on Sunday October 4th at 1pm. We will have a main dish and beverages and ask that you being a covered dish to share. This is a celebration of the harvest and an opportunity to see the farm where your food is grown! We will eat, mingle and tour the farm. Family and friends are welcome and we have plenty of indoor space if the weather is not good. We hope that you plan to join us!
Given the situation a couple months ago it seems strange to write about irrigation, but that’s what’s going on this week! Much of Ben’s time the past few weeks has been spent moving hoses around. This spring we put in a new well and are finally getting a chance to see just how much we can water at a time with it. More then we even anticipated is the answer.
We get water to the crops in several ways. One is through drip tape. You can see the black plastic tube laying right next to the plants.
Drip tape as several benefits. One is that we can fertilize the plants through the irrigation (cleverly known as fertigation). Ben makes a slurry of all organic ingredients that gets sucked into the irrigation lines. The plant then takes up these nutrients through its’ roots.
But drip tape certainly has its limitations and problems so this year we also got a new water reel which is helping the farm be more efficient and tend to more crops. It is a sprinkler gun that automatically travels down the field covering 15 beds at a time. It is allowing us to water seeds that we plant directly into the ground such as spinach, arugula and radishes and without drip tape in our way we can weed much more easily.
We feel we were able to rebound from the wet year and plant like mad because of the new well and water reel. Every investment we make in the farm helps us to grow more vegetables and be better farmers!
We hope you can make it to our potluck to see all these investments, the vegetables that will finish out the CSA deliveries, and enjoy good food and company!
Recipes
Spaghetti with swiss chard and garlic chips (this recipe was brought to our attention by a CSA member who uses it for swiss chard and other greens as well. She also omits the currants. You can add more greens by using your turnip greens or cabbage in addition to the chard)
Broccoli Salad (you can add cubed hakurei turnips to this salad to make it go further as the broccoli heads this week are small. You can also use cauliflower in place of the broccoli. If you still have candy onions you can use them in place of the shallot)
Minestrone Soup (Use green cabbage in place of napa cabbage. Use a mixture of summer squash and zucchini if necessary)