2010 Spring CSA News Week 3: May 21, 2010
Hi folks,
Week three of the Spring CSA will be picked tomorrow in the am. We have an interesting array of vegetables for you again this week:
- Lettuce - mesclun from the yellow house
- Greens medley - from the yellow, blue, and orange house including arugula, tatsoi, spinach, chard and mixed baby Asians
- Oregano from the garden
- Mint from the garden
- Rhubarb from the garden
- Green onions from the pond field
- Carrots from the root cellar
- Daikon from the orange house
We are in that transition time between hoop houses and field. After next week the hoop houses will flip and become home for tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, but we will get 1-2 more weeks of our winter sown crops. Hopefully the fields will be producing with great bounty by that time. You will notice carrots from the root cellar. I wish for all of you a root cellar. We ate potatoes (almost every day), carrots, beets, daikon and celeriac from our root cellar all winter and spring. This week we cleaned it out and are sharing the last of our carrots with you. Though they have been in sand for 5 months, they still have a pretty good flavor. We will be finishing up the last of our potatoes this week (and planting out 500 lbs of them on Monday!).
This week we planted lots more lettuce, chard, celery, turnips and radishes. We tilled up all of our fields and are in the process of making beds in all of them with our new bed former. We have hung up our rakes and welcome this appropriate technology to our farm.
We were able to weed all of our 17 beds of onions and leeks this week and finish putting up the trellises in their new location. Tomorrow we will plant pole beans, shell beans, corn, squash and cukes. The 10 day forecast looks promising for these hot weather crops.
We have made hay in the annex and west field and will have moved it to the brassicas area in the garden by the end of the day tomorrow.
Our young layers arrived this week and they and the meat birds (arriving last week) are well established and looking healthy under their heat lamps. The pigs knocked Jay over today when he brought them their weekly 55 gallons of milk.
The peas are mulched, a bunch of flowers are in and we accomplished almost all of the mowing this week.
Seedling management - starting, watering, moving, covering, uncovering - takes time each day. Jason has figured out our drip system for the hoop houses for automatic watering. We have to add a humate product called huma-carb to our drip to ameliorate the effects of our ultra hard water. The plants in the fields all got a drench of foundation, seacrop, PHT potassium, phytostim, humacarb and Micro 5000. Trees get their foliar on the off week. It was interesting for Rich and I to hear Brian’s run down about how he manages to run the sprayer up and down the rows and make sharp turns on small patches of grass to make it back onto another bed and not trash any plants. Although it is a straight shot in the west field with easy access, the rest of the farm was set up with hand tools in mind. It takes a little finesse to make this all work.
Rich and Clare and I hosted JJ and his sons Francis and Pete at our work day on this past Saturday. The boys enjoyed riding in the truck with the hay. And many thanks to this week's volunteers - Caitlin and Rob and Cody.
Enjoy the upcoming hot weather!
Recipes from Nina
This week I am giving you a couple of recipes for rhubarb.