This Week’s Harvest
Sweet Corn
Jalapeño Pepper
Garlic
Cabbage
Zucchini
Tomatoes
Sungold Cherry Tomatoes
A Day on the Farm
Last Friday we got a lot accomplished and the work we did ran the gamut of all the various tasks that need to be done at any given time. I thought I’d run through the day to give you a sense of a typical July day on the farm (if I can even remember it all!) Before the crew showed up I got all of our harvest bins and knives cleaned and sanitized for the harvest. When the crew arrived most of us harvested for 2nd Street Market starting with the things that need to be cut when it’s cooler like salad mix. Tomatoes and other disease susceptible plants get picked last after the dew is gone and the plants are dry.
While harvest was under way one of our employees seeded 6 beds of carrots and 2 beds of beans and herbs. And Ben was fixing irrigation leaks in one of our fields irrigated through drip tape. That’s quite a process because the drip tape is buried in the dirt under plastic. So you have to find the leak (which means look for puddles of pooling water), dig for the tape, pull it out and splice a fresh piece of tape in place of the torn piece. Needless to say it took him all morning and he was a muddy wet mess at the end of it.
In the afternoon we started the processes of clipping garlic from their stalks for long term storage. The garlic had been drying on dry rack tables but now we needed the tables to dry the onions we had harvested the day prior. Those onions had been left in piles in the field to sun dry for a day but needed to be brought in so it was all hands on deck as we binned up a half acre of onions into 20 bushel crates. In the end we ended up with 10 crates full of 5 different kinds of onions.
Ben then had the task of bringing these crates one at a time into our barn with the tractor. Oh and I forgot that somewhere in there I washed and processed all of the market produce and got ready for market in general like running to the bank for market money. The crew also moved just germinated flats from the germination chamber to the greenhouse and moved ready to plant cucurbits out of the greenhouse to harden off.
The July grind is nothing new but it always manages to be surprise us. Dinner at 10 can get old quickly and the to do list that never reaches total completion and just gets added onto can be taxing. But the produce is looking and tasting really good so it is easy for us to be motivated to keep caring for it!
Recipes
Sweet Corn And Zucchini Risotto
Roasted Tomatillo Poblano Avocado Salsa
Coming Up Next Week (Our Best Guess…..) Garlic, tomatoes, potatoes, celery, red onions, salad mix, beets, fennel, and more