This week’s harvest: Peppers, Kale, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Tomatoes, Squash, Beans, Eggplant, Apples, Pears, Cucumbers, Parsley, Onions, Collards
U-pick: Broccoli, Basil, Kale

Worms. Yuck. Everyone seems to know that worms are great for soil.  Digging up your backyard garden and seeing the wriggly soil churners usually instills a sense of pride – “hey I’ve got worms” – sweet. However find them in an apple, pear, cabbage, broccoli or cauliflower head, gross. I know, I’ve been that way most of my life. But when you really stop to think about what the alternative is, it’s much easier to change your frame of thought. Check out this link if you like to know what’s on the perfect head of broccoli you’ll find at the grocery store, and here to see what you’re ingesting when you buy apples.  Yes you’ll find worms in our apples and pears plus a caterpillar or two in your cauliflower or broccoli but when it’s weighed against the invisible alternative, we hope you’ll realize (I know most you already do, otherwise why join a CSA?) that finding a couple critters on your produce is a good sign.

A local chef told us he’s been finding a few “creepy crawlies” on our broccoli, but it was by far the sweetest and most tender broccoli he’s come across and he’s ordered it week after week.

With that in mind, while we’ve been trying to do a good job with washing and culling our produce, between the apples, pears, cabbage and broccoli, we know we won’t be able to give you a worm-free CSA share, but we hope that you can understand that’s not really a bad thing.

Two more weeks to go plus a special “thank you week” that is TBD.  Once again thank you for supporting the farm.

Pete, Reid, and Linley

This week’s harvest: Beans, Cucumbers, Squash, Kale, Chard, Broccoli, Peppers, Pears, Onions, Carrots, Beets, Parsley, Tomatoes, Basil, Cabbage or Cauliflower (switch from last week)

Hi all, Pete here. With fall in the air it feels a bit like we’re winding the season down.  However there’s a lot more in store provided the frost holds off just a bit. Firstly, we need to talk about kale. Kale is so awesome. I really have no idea how anyone can eat a salad without kale. Arugula, baby kale and mizuna not withstanding, I can’t quite bring myself to eat a “lettuce salad.” There’s just not a whole lot of flavor or nutrition. At this point lettuce is just a vessel for your dressing so why perpetuate the charade?  Kale salads are so much more nutritious and really just more interesting. We put the juice and zest of a lemon, olive oil and herbs on our fresh kale salad along with whatever your favorite accouterments may be (toasted almonds, sesame seeds, pine nuts, cheese, fruit…). No: you don’t need to cook it. Stop kidding yourselves, kale salads are where it’s at. (And no. I’m not saying this because we’ve had difficulty keeping up with the labor of successive lettuce sowings). We do intend to hire another person next year specifically for head lettuce and salad mixes, but in the meantime: harvest kale!  We’ve planted plenty so blanch it, chop it and freeze it.  You’ll thank us come winter.

Pumpkins are really coming in along with winter squash, but they’re still a couple weeks out. Tomatoes are on the way out but we’ve still have a few slicers for this weeks share after a brief hiatus. Peppers. Oh man do we have peppers. One of the new varieties we planted this year is a yellow Italian heirloom. Normally we don’t brag, but at Farmer’s Market this past week, the taste of this particular sweet yellow pepper led one of our customers to tears while she reminisced about her childhood in Italy. Full disclosure; I tasted the pepper, and while I wasn’t quite moved to tears, it was in fact very good. So let us know what you think? This is the fun of running a CSA: we get to keep testing out new varieties to increase our offerings.

Lastly, it’s been a while since I’ve written the CSA, but I will go back to my standard mantra – please walk the farm. I know the strawberries are gone, but go pick some outdoor heirloom tomatoes or broccoli side shoots. You can see how far behind the tomatoes are – they are flowering like it’s the beginning of July! But the few you find that are ripe out there will be well worth the trouble, even if they’re ugly – especially the sungolds! While we know you’re pressed for time, it’s worth a walk through the brassicas (especially the broccoli) to experience the “hum” of the beneficial insects and pollinators that are attracted to the sideshoots. How brilliant of broccoli to produce flowers that attract the insects that eat the aphids that the leaves attract.  This is your farm, so feel free to explore and ask us questions!

Sincerely,

Pete, Lin and Reid

This week’s harvest: tomatoes, peppers, onions, mizuna/arugula mix, parsley, basil, broccoli, carrots, beets, squash, beans, kale, chard

As always, u-pick herbs, flowers, extra kale and chard

“A weed is simply a plant whose virtues we haven’t yet discovered”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Another giant harvest, I hope you’ve been busy stir-frying, juicing, or freezing what is left. This time of year on the farm, what were once long beds of carrots, beets, onions, and garlic is now fallow (gone to the weeds). It has raised the question among visitors. Aren’t weeds on a farm bad? We don’t think so. Our answer has to do with a larger concept of land stewardship and what it means to us to take care of the land we are farming.

We choose to allow weeds to grow in a planting bed after a crop has been harvested, rather than leaving bare soil. We also prefer pulled weeds in the walking aisles. We have mowed weeds around the fence lines to keep away the rabbits, but only after they flowered and attracted the beneficial insects we need to control aphids. To us, a growing weed is performing many useful functions in the farm:

• Creating organic matter, which when returned to the soil helps retain moisture and nutrients.
• Shading the soil from the harsh sunlight, keeping it wet through the hot summer days.
• Nurturing microorganisms in the soil, which break down organic matter into the nutrients plants need.
• Breaking up hard clay soils, like we have on our Mancos Ln. plot. Or also to hold sandier soils together, like we have on our 32^nd St. plot.
• Attracting beneficial insects into the farm, allowing us to never use any insecticides.
• Providing food. The majority of the weeds that grow are edible, nutritious, and delicious.

The more time we’ve spent on the farm, the more we’ve witnessed the benefits weeds offer. We’ve even come to notice that leaving bare soil may actually be the worst thing you can do for a farm or garden that relies on healthy soil and plant diversity in order to grow nutritious vegetables. Bare soil gets scorched by the sun, compacted, doesn’t absorb water, and makes us slip in the mud when it rains! Many farms are worse off when they are scraped clean of weeds, leaving a hard pan where soil begins to degrade.

But there does come a point when the weeds are truly “weeds;” when the growth of the weed is inhibiting the growth of the crop. Yes, there are weeds on our farm, always more weeds than we would like (believe us, if there were more hours in a day they would be spent weeding), but all is not lost when a bed gets overgrown with weeds, especially if you look at the health of the soil in the long-term. And even if the crop wasn’t weeded in the timeliest of fashions, we have yet to lose a crop to weeds this season.

Weeds are just nature’s way of trying to grow again after the farmer has disturbed the soil. Nature has stored up a seemingly endless seed supply in our soils, ready to grow as soon as they get a little bit of water. So as long as there is a farm, there will be weeds.

So with that wordy answer, we hope that we were able to clarify some questions about why some parts of the farm look a bit on the weedy side – and that we didn’t create a bunch more questions. If you do have any, as always, please don’t hesitate to ask us. Luckily the weeds will be getting hit with a frost that is likely only about a month away!

See you all later today, and hopefully it will be a sunny pick-up!

Reid, Linley, Pete

This week’s harvest: salad mix, basil, eggplant, peppers, carrots, beets, squash, broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, kale, onions, chard, collards

Extra u-pick flowers, herbs, and greens: sunflowers, cosmos, thai basil, basil, purple basil, dill, parsley, kale, chard

It’s time to officially say goodbye to the strawberries! Our June bearers were mowed down this week hopefully to come back twice as productive next year.  The mowing is done to keep the “runners” (baby plants) from over-crowding the plot.

We’ve also maxed out on the first round of kohlrabi for the year, but we’ve seeded another round in the greenhouse for fall. It will be a race against the first frost to see if it bulbs in time so you may have to wait until next summer to partake in this alien looking brassica. Rumor has it that many of you are kohlrabi converts turning it into chips, raw salad shavings, and even merging it with the tart transparent apples

The good news is the 32^nd St. plot is just getting started. Broccoli, cabbage, squash, zucchini, and cauliflowers are coming along nicely, and we’re not far off from harvesting larger amounts of beans and cucumbers. We’re looking at peak tomato season in the tunnel and the outside tomatoes are just beginning to ripen.

Learning what and how much to plant to feed our members and provide a livable wage for us given the farmland and equipment we have access to is a continual process. If you have time to read this recent NYTimes article about small-scale farming, we felt it accurately reflects our experience as farmers over the last 4 years. It is quite moving for us to read, knowing others are farming with us, fighting an uphill battle against a food system and culture that doesn’t support responsible farming practices. Please know that as far as we’re concerned, becoming a CSA member is the single most important way you can support us and this movement. We are grateful for you daily.

Dinners have been beautiful lately. We use a mandolin to finely chop eggplant, squash, carrots, beets, onions, kale, tomatoes and chard into a glass pan, pour over white wine, a little soy, garlic, and sesame oil and bake at 350 until veggies are tender. This works with about anything in your share.

Looking forward to sharing the healthy harvest with you over the remaining 2 months. See you tomorrow from 3-6.

Linley, Peter, Reid

This week’s harvest: tomatoes galore, basil, garlic, onions, carrots, beets, kohlrabi, dill, parsley, kale, squash
Do you want the bad news first, or the good?

OK, let’s get the bad news over with. Yes, it hailed on our farm Monday evening. Deja vu? It was just last September when we were going through the same thing: assessing the damage on the farm from just 5 quick minutes of quarter size hail. It’s incredible how destructive it can be in such a short time. The salad greens turned to mush. Tomato, pepper, eggplant, squash, and cucumber leaves became skeletonized and fruits were pelleted. Plants with slightly tougher leaves like kale, cabbage, broccoli, and sunflowers, remained largely intact this time.

The good news…we have so many crops in tunnels, crops with tougher leaves, and crops underground, you’re share is just lovely this week and will continue to be.

One of our work/share members, Kate Greenburg (of the National Young Farmers Coalition), introduced me to the concept of resilience last year. Resilience is “the ability to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly in the face of turbulent change.” Here are a few things we do to help us limit the risks we face:

1. We grow with diversity. We use it to attract beneficial insects to the farm and rotate where crops are grown so that pests don’t build up.  Nutrient demands from different crops vary so it helps maintain soil fertility. Diversity mitigates losses from the failure of any single crop.
2. We have lots of covered space to protect against bad weather (four hoophouses, a greenhouse, and lots of low tunnels covered with floating row covers).
3. We have a CSA that provides a source of income at the beginning of the season and is flexible with what it receives depending on what is ready to harvest.
4. We have work/share members who help ease the work-load.
5. We have multiple outlets for our produce when we have excess including farmers market, farm to school, restaurants and grocery stores.
6. We have city water, well water, and irrigation water.
7. We have plots in different locations with different soil types and advantages.

Don’t get me wrong. The hail scared us, made us question why we’re farming, and whether or not we should continue to farm! The commitment we’ve made to our CSA members to provide a great deal on lots of veggies all summer is one we take very seriously. After losing a little sleep with worry, we’ve been planting like crazy to replace the greens and pruning impacted fruit to help the plants recover. If the hail stays away for the season, that’s just the way things will go.

Thanks for your support,
Linley, Pete, and Reid