This week’s share:
- Lettuce
- Greens
- Kale
- Chard
- Beets
- Hakurei salad turnip
- Radishes
- Kohlrabi
- Parsnips
- PYO Strawberries
- PYO Parsley
If harvest time permits we may also include spinach and/or
scallions in the share this week. If you
don’t see these items in the share this week there’s a good chance that we’ll
have them for next week.
Updates from the field
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| Another few weeks for cabbage |
I sometimes daydream about what farming would be like if we
didn’t need to harvest any of the things we grow. “What if our job stopped at filling our fields
with beautify and bounty?” I imagine a
farm as a landscape rather than a place of production. This scandalizing fantasy isn’t the result of
any displeasure I take from the work of harvesting. Bringing in our crops is both figuratively
and literally the most rewarding part of the job. Rather I lament the loss of so many precious
daylight hours when there is yet so much work to be done. Once CSA distribution begins around half of
the field crew’s time is spent on harvest.
The other half of our time must be divided between greenhouse work,
seeding, cultivating, field preparation, transplanting, irrigating, equipment
and infrastructural maintenance, pest control and the rest of the less glamorous
business of farming.
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| Beets look ready now |
This past week we have been feeling the pressure to
accomplish as much as possible before harvest becomes the focus of our
days. I’m very proud of the way we have
been managing the farm so far this season and I believe the rest of the crew
feels the same. It seems that many of
our more labor intensive investments are paying off with good healthy crops and
solid yields. However it is now imperative
to remember to not sacrifice the good in pursuit of the perfect. What use are fields filled with beauty and
bounty if we leave the fruit of our labor to spoil?
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| Farm mascot Murgatroyd watches over the PYO fields. Better follow those limits! |
On the top of our priority list this week is finishing our
winter squash planting which is going in at Moraine farm. This might be an all day kind of job and
I’m very anxious to get it behind us before our transplants grow too large and
tangled to work with. If we can
squeeze in some time for planting lettuce, watermelon, summer squash, scallions,
basil and PYO flowers I would be thrilled.
Also on the agenda this week (albeit pretty far down on the list) is
seeding a cover crop mix of soybeans, sorghum sudan grass, oats and buckwheat in
our fallowed field. I’m very excited to
see how this cover crop does perhaps because we will never need to harvest it!
