This Week’s Harvest
Salad Mix
Radish Bunches
Tomatoes
Eggplant
Mini Sweet Bell Peppers
Romano Green Beans
Red Onions
Golden Zucchini
Garlic
Apple Share
Honeycrisp (greener, tart and crisp) and Gala (sweet, small red)
Farm News
This week on the farm has been all about keeping the crew and plants hydrated and cool. Unfortunately it hasn’t rained in 3 weeks and with it also being so warm, it is hard to keep everything properly watered. As soon as we run the irrigation on something it feels like the next day it needs water again! Our irrigation gun that runs on an automatic reel is only 300 ft long. This is the length of most of our fields, but we are currently growing in 2 fields that are over 400 ft long. This means we have to do 2 passes with the water reel to get the entire length of the field. That coupled with the fact that we are running the reel very slowly to give a good solid soaking just means getting water to everything is a slow process. When its dry like this, we run the irrigation 24/7 and have to set up water in the dark to run overnight. Hopefully by the end of the week, we’ve hit everything and we just repeat the process the next week. Oh and I didn’t even mention that some days we run the irrigation gun are super windy and we just cross our fingers everything gets hit.
We are pretty tried of late night water set-up dates and hot sticky days. The only saving grace is the time year this dry spell is hitting us. We have less crops we are actively watering and the sun sets earlier giving us some respite from the heat.
Also we’ve made some adjustments to our crop plan that are really panning out. In years past we’ve started our fall brassicas a couple weeks earlier than we did this year. But the last couple of years we’ve had the first round of broccoli and cauliflower succumb to disease as September seems to remain hot and humid (the perfect weather for breeding fungal diseases). So we nixed a handful brassicas entirely from the first round of brassicas and pushed everything back 2 weeks. July 4th was my old target planting date for fall brassica planting to begin and now we are looking at July 20th as our new first planting date. I am so glad we aren’t trying to harvest broccoli in 90 degree heat!
I’m glad we are able to adjust and continue to grow a wide variety of vegetables for our customers! And I know that come November, I’ll be missing this warm weather!
Recipes
Kashkeh Bademjan (this eggplant recipe was shared on our Facebook CSA group page)
Italian Breaded and Baked Vegetables
Tuna Salad Stuffed Tomatoes with Arugula
Coming Up Next Week (our best guess……) Swiss Chard, Radishes, Salad Mix, Honeynut Squash, Bok Choi, Cilantro, Tomatoes, Onions, Poblano Peppers