In the kitchen!

August 3, 2021 In the Kitchen, Market newsletters, Other recipes, Weekly Updates

With the peak of tomato season upon us, the tomato harvest has been crazy! This week, we brought in nearly 40 pounds of cherry tomatoes and over 300 pounds of slicing tomatoes and that was just in the first harvest of the week. We will likely at least double those numbers by the week’s end! Unsurprisingly, we’ve gotten creative over the years and found out-of-the-box ways to make use of tomatoes. One of our favorite finds was a way for short-term preserving cherry tomatoes by “sun-drying” them in the oven at a low heat for several hours. The result is bit-sized morsels of sweetness that can be added to sandwiches,...

Tomato time!

July 28, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

This is one of the busiest times on the farm, hence the lack of a blog post last week! We’re heavy into the tomato harvest, which takes up significant amounts of time each week. At the time time, we’re starting to plant the first of the fall crops while also planting the last of the summer crops, so all in all we’ve barely got a minute to call our own! We grow a variety of tomatoes and you’ll see a varied selection over the course of tomato season. This year, we’re again growing one of our favorite heirlooms- Berkeley Tie Die. This striped slicing tomato is both tasty and beautiful....

Sunny

July 12, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s been incredibly hot this summer and this week looks like another scorcher. We’re lucky to have the flexibility to work in the morning and evening when it’s less oppressive out for both us and our son, who spends a lot of time on the farm with us during the summer. We try to involve Caleb in the farm as much as he likes and each of the past two years he has had his own small garden inside of the farm where he gets to choose what to grow. This year, along with beans, peas, and potatoes, he is also growing enormous sunflowers whose stalks can grow up to...

Amazing bugs!

July 5, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

I get a lot of questions about insect pests at the markets and people are usually surprised at the enthusiasm with which I talk about them. It’s hard to be an organic farmer without developing some level of interest in insects and I find them fascinating even though they can drive me up the wall at the same time! The last two years, we’ve had somewhat low levels of several of the pests we deal with yearly, including Japanese beetles (which munch on the leaves of pretty much anything) and Harlequin bugs (which target kale, collards, and other crops in that family.) At the same time, we saw an explosion...

Hot!

June 29, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s hard to believe each year that, right as the summer harvest is beginning, we’re also starting to seed transplants for the fall! This week, I seeded all of the fall brassicas, from kale and collards to cabbage and cauliflower. Meanwhile, the spring kale and collards are gradually moving towards their end as heat and pest pressure increase. At the same time, the cucumbers and zucchini are hitting full stride and the first eggplant are beginning to size up on the plants. (The picture above is of an eggplant flower, which I find one of the most beautiful!) Our field beans are unusually late as they dealt with multiple dips...

Moving into summer

June 22, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

The up and down weather we’ve experienced all season has made our harvesting less predictable than usual. We plant beds so that when one crop is just ending, a new one is just beginning and generally this works out surprisingly well. This year, however, some things are ahead of schedule and others behind, making the transition from crop to crop less on schedule that we would hope! However, the summer crops seem to be gradually coming into their own despite several fairly chilly stretches since they were planted in mid-May. There are a plethora of green tomatoes on the plants, which are about 4 feet tall at this point. The...

Deja Vu

June 15, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

The end of last week felt like a major flashback to 2018, the first year of our farm and the year that basically broke records for rainfall starting in April and running through the entire summer. Last Thursday, I sat in the hoop house while rain cascaded down outside, flooding the farm and causing a small stream to wash through the middle of several beds. We got two inches of rain in one hour! And because apparently that wasn’t enough, we preceded to have unrelentingly heavy rain through the night and the following day, resulting in a total of 5 1/2 inches of rain falling in less that 24 hours,...

Farm friends

June 8, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Like everyone in our area, we’ve been enjoying the Brood X cicadas over the last few weeks. It’s hard to be an organic farmer without becoming interested in insects. They play a huge role on both sides on the farm and I find them all fascinating. There are the problem ones, like the onion root flies whose larvae destroyed our onions this year and the ubiquitous cabbage moths whose larvae like to munch through anything in the kale and cabbage family. And then, of course, there are the good ones. Lady bugs are probably the best known and we always see a big population of these on the farm. Like...

June already!

May 31, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

As always seems to be the case, we’ve gone from famine to feast with rainfall. After several weeks of no rain at all, in the last week we received nearly two and a half inches of rain over just a few days! The summer crops have also had a rather strange start to life in the field, with their first week in the ground marked by record high temperatures that made watering them multiple times a day necessary. This was promptly followed this past weekend by temperatures plummeting to record lows, bottoming out in the low forties at night. After completing the depressing task of pulling all of our onion...

Moving forward

May 24, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

After two weeks with nothing more than a spitting of rain, we finally had a decently wet day on Monday, which was a relief both to the plants and to my arms, which are getting awfully sore from watering! While we are able to rely on drip irrigation to water many of the plants on the farm, the real trick during dry periods is getting the crops that are seeded directly into the field to germinate when it’s not raining. Some things, like arugula and salad mix, germinate fairly quickly, only requiring a few days of watering. Others, particularly carrots, take a lot longer, so it was unfortunate that I...

Two Feet in the Dirt

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