First full-time job
From David:
At a market this week, a customer asked “Is this your full time job?” I don’t think the question was intended to be heavy, but it lasted with me. I have surely never worked so hard or devoted so much energy, focus, or attention to any previous or current work, professional orfirst full-time job. otherwise. So maybe, I suppose, this is my first full-time job.
This week, as we are transitioning from spring to summer, and drying out from last week’s rains, we ask for your patience as our menu of produce may be less consistent and provided “as available” more-so than in previous weeks. Some crops are maturing inconsistently and the result may need to be variations in what we offer between our Sunday deliveries and pickups and our Wednesday shareholders. This week, we’ll be providing:
Green Cabbage, Red Cabbage, or Broccoli (as available), Romaine head lettuce, Spring Mix Lettuce, Beets, Kale, Kohlrabi, Oregano, early pickings of green long sweets & baby bell peppers, eggs, and flowers.
We’ve had some new additions to our flock of hens and our subsequent egg production is looking more like what we expected. We’re hoping to be able to provide those families requesting full dozens what they need this week. Thank you for you patience as we’ve adjusted.
We had our first Saturday farmers market yesterday and were pleasantly surprised with our results. Because of your investments, and the consequential motivation to provide early, consistent vegetable production for your families, we were the first farm to arrive with Cabbage, Broccoli, Beets, Carrots, and Peppers. This made a great first impression resulting in considerable sales of our homestead surplus, which is an essential component contributing to the sustainability of this project. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
To begin this week’s update, we included a quote by Wendell Berry, an influential proponent of organic practices and a universally inspirational writer/poet to market gardeners and organic/regenerative farmers. We will elaborate in upcoming email updates and face-to-face as we have the time, as our predicament becomes more clear, but we are having issues in our summer field blocks with crops battling herbicide drift and/or persistence, effecting especially our rows of field tomatoes. We have never applied any chemicals, herbicides, fungicides, or pesticides of any kind on our property, but our summer crops are suffering regardless. Though there are many indirect ways this can happen and it is becoming more and more of an issue for modern vegetable growers, we never saw this coming. We have had professional help visit the farm, take plant samples, and conduct tests only to find the absence of any treatable fungal or viral disease. It’s a tough situation but the good news is we still have hundreds of healthy established plants with backup late plantings going in behind them, though we can expect our yields of those particular effected tomato varieties to be lower and later than anticipated. We will speak more on this in later updates, but as Wendell Berry said, “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
We’re planting sweet potatoes as fast as we can this week! Our early sweet corn is officially knee high. Early potatoes are flowering- growing their tubers subsurface and cherry tomatoes are just about to show some color. As the young tendrils of our freshly transplanted cucumbers are trained to grip their trellises, it truly seems like you could sit in the hoophouse and literally watch them grow as cute little pickle babies poke out between limbs.
Peppers, sweets and hot waxes, are popping out of flowers all over the summer field blocks. We’re picking them young to encourage those plants to produce more, some of which we will leave to ripen red. With only a week until the solstice, we’re constantly reminded of the changing season and can’t wait to start picking basketfuls of summer fruits for your families.
Stay tuned!
Erin & David