Orientation and Open House this Saturday!

Easter Egg radishes -
an early season favorite

This Saturday June 8th from 9am to 11am we will be holding an Open House and Orientation at the CSA barn. New and experienced shareholders alike are welcome! Your farmers will be on hand to talk about share room procedure and, weather-permitting, will be offering tours of the pick-your-own fields. We'll also have information about educational programming at the farm, including Appleton Cooks, which is a year-round menu of programs featuring classes, workshops and farm-to-table dinners. The Dairy Store will open at 9am as well and will be offering samples of some of their delicious dairy products. In addition, the folks from Le Creuset will be on hand with information about their discount program for CSA members (30% off for all purchases over $100!).

The past two weeks have been a blur of transplanting and weeding. In order to keep up with our tasks, last week we made the dreaded shift from a 7am start to a 6am start (we'll be working a 6am-5pm schedule until September). That's because it's peak planting season - our crop schedule for May 29th alone is nearly 5 pages long, out of an 18 page schedule! In the past week we've transplanted our eggplant, main season tomatoes, PYO tomatoes, PYO flowers, most of our sweet peppers, half our watermelons, and our weekly lettuce planting. We've also seeded greens, sunflowers, beans, and edamame directly into the fields. By the end of the week we hope to have finished our peppers and watermelon, get celery and celeriac into the ground, and seed our next plantings of cilantro, dill and greens.

On the weed control side of things, we've been trying to keep our cultivating tractors running every dry moment that we've had (if you cultivate when the soil is wet, the weeds will just re-root). We've also been busy hand-weeding and hoeing our lettuce, fennel, parsnips, beets, carrots, kale, and onions. Before the end of the week we're hoping to get a second hand-weeding pass at the leeks, hoe our 4th lettuce planting, thin and weed our last bed of parsnips and if there's any time, keep plugging away at our seemingly endless task of thinning and weeding beets and carrots.

We've got ambitious plans for the rest of the week, and right now it's hard to imagine how much busier our days could possibly be. Starting next week, however, we'll be spending the entire morning (6am - noon) harvesting for the CSA, and we'll be trying to cram in all the weeding, seeding, transplanting and tractor work into the afternoons. We have an amazing crew, though, so I have full confidence that we can pull it off! The fields are looking beautiful right now, and hopefully we've laid the groundwork over the past 12 weeks for a successful 2013 season. I think all our hard work this spring will pay off in the form of a bountiful first week of CSA veggies! (Check the blog in a few days to find out what you can expect in the share next week.)