(CSA Newsletter: Week 6)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
Last week the cooling system on our cooler broke. Our cooler is homemade: it’s a large well-insulated shed with an air conditioner to cool it. The air conditioner is regulated with a device called a CoolBotTM that was designed and built by a farmer in New York. It’s a neat little device that essentially overrides the thermostat in the air conditioner, allowing it to cool the space to ideal veggie storage temperatures. Ours is set for 34°.
When the digital readout on the thermostat started blinking and then went black last Wednesday (accompanied by a rising temperature), Casey called the CoolBotTM maker, Ron Khosla, to assess the situation. It turns out that the transformer had simply shorted out because of moisture in the cooler. Fortunately, the fix didn’t require a trip to a hardware store or radio shack. Instead, with Ron’s guidance, Casey simply fixed it by replacing the transformer with one salvaged from the plug of an old cell phone charger (obsolete technology can serve a useful purpose it turns out!).
Casey reminded me a bit of MacGyver, splicing the new salvaged transformer into the CoolBotTM box — fixing things with found parts is fun!
We often get that experience here on the farm. Many of our tools are farm specific, such as our hoes and tractor implements. But often we fix things or make tools out of other random objects and parts too — jury rig is the name of the game in farming.
For example, when we clean our veggie washing dunk tubs, we use a drywall putty knife to scrape the mud out before giving them a good scrubbing down. Also, we use a bent piece of roofing flashing and a chopstick for better accuracy in sowing seeds into plug trays. And, an old pallet bin with a side removed makes an awesome container for mixing our potting soil. And so on …
Certainly most of the time we try to have exactly the right tool for the job, but it’s always exciting to find unexpected applications for less expensive objects and materials. To that end, we have built and fixed many, many things with T-posts and bailing twine. In fact, I’d say that bailing twine serves the same multi-purpose role for our farm that a paperclip does for MacGyver.
Enjoy this week’s well-chilled vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
Two other veggie notes:
First the bummer news: as you may have noticed by their absence in the shares, we really did lose the vast majority of our potatoes this winter to extreme cold. We miss them as much as I’m sure you do. However, we wanted to let you know that we are capable of learning from mistakes and hard lessons. Here’s how we’re going to make it up to you:
First of all, we’re planting extra potatoes this year, and we plan to begin harvesting new potatoes as early as possible this summer. Usually we don’t give out many potatoes during the summer season, but we feel that we’ll all still want to eat them after a winter without.
Secondly, this next winter, we’re planning to dig a good proportion of our potato crop before any extreme cold weather hits. That way, we’ll have potatoes in storage and in the fields to pull from for the shares in early 2011.
We’re always thinking at least a year in advance, so while we’re on the subject of next winter, we wanted to share the news that we trialed an outstanding crop this year: over-wintering purple broccoli! We grew one bed this year for the first time, and it has been awesome — the plants survived the crazy cold weather uncovered and are now putting out absolutely drool-worthy bright purple broccoli heads. They’re vibrant and beautiful and taste amazing.
The downside? The heads are tiny! — only one to three-inches across. So, we need to grow a lot more of this crop to produce enough broccoli for the CSA. But we’re sold and plan to do so for next year. We can’t wait to share it with you in 2011 — just another reason to eat seasonally with Oakhill Organics!
