Delivery & Pick-Up Scheduling Updates
Based on your feedback last week through our Membership Questionnaire, we’ve decided to schedule our harvests and deliveries for Wednesdays & Sundays this harvest season. We wish we could offer more flexibility and personal accommodation, but the nature of our modest homestead scaling up so significantly requires us to be on the farm as many hours as possible. We therefore need to coordinate our harvests and deliveries on preset days.
We hope that your family understands our limits in this regard and will be assured by the benefit that your produce will still be alive in the soil the morning of your delivery/pick up!
If you could please reply to this email with your preference for Wednesday or Sunday based on the times/locations above, whether you are a home delivery shareholder, city pick up, or farm pick up, we can begin to finalize our schedule.
We would have loved to have gotten these deliveries started next week on the 16th. We think we planned accordingly, got our cool season crops in on time, and kept them healthy and protected, but the recent cold weather has slowed their momentum just a bit. To be safe, it’s best to wait to harvest until the 23rd.
Our dance with Mother Nature has been interesting this spring and, as is true with many Ohio farmers, we’ve had some obstacles. While our April plantings are doing well, we missed the boat on getting our May and June gardens built proactively during this year’s surprisingly dry April. We’re kicking ourselves a bit because this soaking wet weather, combined with an unfortunate breakdown of our rototiller, has us now struggling to get into the wet fields to finish constructing beds for warm season crops. Our greenhouse is filling up as we continue marching tomato and pepper plants out of our nursery, but we’re stalled until things get drier. We will do our absolute best, as promised, but it’s unclear how these will effect harvests down the road. Thankfully, we are not losing crops. But we can’t help but feel anxious to get them in the ground in time for the return of the warm weather.
In your first box, we will likely be harvesting Green Onions, Parsley, Sprigs of Thyme, Lettuce, baby and broad-leaved Kale, Spring Mix Salad, Brassica micro greens, and Bok Choy. Also thriving in the garden are dense rows of multiple cabbage, broccoli, and potato cultivars as well as oregano, sage, rosemary, beets, peas, carrots, radish, spinach, arugula, kohlrabi, and some spring garlic varieties. We will be closely monitoring their growth and get these finished crops in your hands when they are appropriately mature. Gladly, we haven’t had to use any pest control other than the occasional hand to hand combat with some cabbage butterflies looking to birth hungry caterpillars on our brassicas. Flea Beatles have shown some interest in our Bok Choy, but not enough for us to feel it necessary to pull any triggers. Only organic measures will be considered if we must.
Our cherry tomato seedlings are about 2 feet tall and begging to get out of the greenhouse. It’s hard to be patient, but necessary for now. We have San Marzano, Pink Wonder, Moskovich, and Martha Washington tomato seedlings going as well. In the Pepper department, bell peppers are broad-leaved and thick-stemmed, constantly producing new flower buds that we are reluctantly picking off, reminding those impatient summer crops they have got to wait. Shishito peppers, Hungarian Hot Wax peppers, Jalapeños and Anaheims are building roots and shoots in the nursery as well. Cucumbers have sprouted and we just can’t wait to get the Squashes going!
It requires patience and knowledge that we are just beginning to pursue, but our perennial and wild edible plant population is showing some promise. We have young apple trees, a few of which have finally blossomed, Raspberries leaved and budding up, Serviceberry too, and we’ve planted a variety of edible native trees including Pawpaw, American Plum, and American Hazlenut. We may not have much of our own harvest this season, but with your help, we’re building an environment that is beautiful, diverse, and sustainable here. As is not uncommon this time of year, we’ve foraged a bit for wild spring harvests of Stinging Nettle and Chickweed but have yet to find a Morel mushroom anywhere on the property. In fact, David has never found one and it keeps him up at night. Next year’s going to be the year!
Thank you for reading through this week’s farm update and we appreciate your response as to which day, Wednesday or Sunday, could work for your delivery or pick up. We’ll be happy to discuss any questions or concerns this may raise. We’re not facebookers or tweeters so If you haven’t already, please follow our accounts on Instagram @morckelmeadows & @morckelrecordiculture, where we are actively sharing. We feel truly blessed to have this land to steward and your families to feed!
Erin & David