News from the Farm, Monday July 6th
The rain of the last few days has been an amazing blessing. It’s something to revel in – the feeling of standing outside in the warm-but-not-too-hot sun, bare feet planted on well-watered soil, with vigorous growth underway on all sides. It’s ideal growing weather – what a thrill!
The rain provided ample opportunities to plant seeds and seedlings under great conditions last week. Celery, kale, cabbage, radishes, turnips, cilantro and parsley all went in the ground. Weeding has been completed on our onions, leeks, cilantro, kale, collards, basil, peppers, winter squash and much of the lettuce.
Weeding will be a big feature of the vegetable work this upcoming week – Julie has her eye on the remaining lambsquarters and pigweed in particular, which are growing at the enthusiastic rate of 6 inches a day and need to come out. Mulching remains a priority too. It’s also time to pull up two more tarps from our new growing areas in the former hay fields. In this area of approximately 6,000 square feet, the crew will put in rutabaga, parsnips, dill, a third succession of beans, carrots and beets, a second succession of summer squash and cucumbers and basil.
In animal news, this year’s turkey poults arrived on July 2nd, cute as buttons. We raise broad-breasted whites from Bob’s Turkey Farm in Lancaster. These beautiful, active birds are fun to have around and provide loud and entertaining commentary on farm goings-on. They grow to a reasonable size (16-18#s for hens, 20-24#s for toms) and, when the time comes, have a superb texture and rich flavor. They are available for pre-order now at https://mhof.net/organic-meat/, along with chicken, pork and more.
In staff news, our new WWOOFer Simon is close to finishing his first week here and is already proving to be a “quiet star on the farm”, in Julie’s words. Jocelyn restarts as a working shareholder on Friday. She has been with us off and on for about 25 years. Overall, Julie continues on quite happy with the state of things on the farm, despite always having way more to do than can be done.
This week we’re welcoming 13 new members to the CSA. Welcome! 🙂 We also have a few spots left for a first pickup on Friday July 17th in Holden or Barre. Share prices and delivery fees have been prorated: Large shares now cost $510, Medium shares cost $345, and Small shares cost $255. An additional one-time delivery fee of $32 will apply for shares delivered to Holden. Please ask your friends to read more and sign up at https://mhof.net/csa-share-options/ – and thank you to those who have already helped us make this connection!
