Meet this week’s Mac veggies:
(Photo coming soon!)
- Broccoli — The first of the early summer broccoli. These are the your traditional broccoli — nothing fancy, just good eatin’. Enjoy!
- Strawberries
- Sugar snap peas — Holy moly — Casey and the crew picked so many peas this week! And, they didn’t even finish! Enjoy your giantest bag of peas. (Overwhelmed? Blanche and freeze for winter eating!)
- Lettuce
- Salad mix
- Kale
- Summer squash — The first of the summer squash. So delicious sliced onto salads; grilled; roasted and added to pasta salad … really, the list could just go on and on! These are of course a summer staple, so find your favorite ways to eat them!
- Onions
- Garlic scapes — Soon we’ll be harvesting the garlic itself, but for now we are enjoying these in everything. I even added them to homemade hummus this weekend!
Happy Fourth of July week everyone! I hope you had a great, safe holiday weekend. Here on the farm, we celebrated Casey’s birthday (which is on the fifth of July) and then relaxed and enjoyed some of the first “summer”-like weather of the year.
In addition to his birthday, Casey and I have a unique seasonal way to mark this time of year. This is the season when we do one of many more intentional “check-ins” on the farm. Obviously, we’re walking the fields almost every day. When Casey moves irrigation in the mornings or goes out to harvest lettuce for restaurants, he’s seeing the fields and intuitively noting things such as moisture level in the soil, weedy spots, and other moment-by-moment things.
Those things, however, are often focused on the details, and it’s nice to have some regular times in the year to step back and take a look again at the whole. We’ve found that early July (right around the Fourth) is a great time to do this: step back and get a sense of how spring has gone and where we’re headed (generally speaking) in this growing season. By July, any problems in fertility or ground prep will be strikingly obvious (no more ignoring them!), and often this is essentially too late to significantly shift the tides. We’re fully in the growing season, so things better be on the “right” track (i.e. planted, weeded once, irrigated properly thus far, etc.).
So, how are we doing? Casey and I walked the fields a few times this weekend, and we were pleasantly surprised to see how well things look in terms of the big picture. This spring’s major frustration has been the mild weather — especially the higher than average rainfall (which put off some plantings) and the much cooler than average temperatures (leading to slower growth in most cases).
But, even given those circumstances, the fields were planted in a fairly prompt manner, and our crew has been diligently weeding since. Keeping up on irrigation has been easier than usual, since the more serious irrigation season really just began in recent weeks (rather than in late April or early May as it has in past years). All signs right now point to a “good” rest of the growing season. There are always unexpected weather or pest (or tractor) events, but as far as we can tell, the plants we need to grow well are growing more or less well.
The biggest concern we have is simply that we do need a certain number of solidly warm days in order to grow some crops to maturity — notably winter squash, corn, dry beans, and peppers (crops of the Americas!). If fall comes early, it could make for either a later, sloppier, or less satisfying harvest of these crops. But, it is still just early July, so we have hope that the healthy, vigorously growing plants in our field will do their business fine this year.
Here are some other specific notes from this weekend’s field walks:
Our earliest corn is in fact “knee high by the Fourth of July”! A little taller, in fact! We are very excited about our corn this year. In addition to planting sweet corn, we are experimenting with a wide range of other kinds of corn (or, perhaps more accurately, maize). But the maize warrants its own newsletter, so I’ll come back to this topic later.
The tomatoes are doing fantastically. Typically, we’re eating our first ripe cherry tomato at Casey’s birthday, which we did not do this year, so they are clearly behind in some ways. But the plants themselves are taller than our belly buttons and dark green. Casey and the crew have trained and pruned them, and there are green fruits out there. Since we grow our tomatoes in an open hoop house, they do have an advantage still over the rest of our crops, and we have every reason to think that we’ll be enjoying our first ripe fruits by mid- to late summer.
The peas, which you are surely enjoying in abundance this week, have had a stellar year. Apparently, the mild weather has benefited them hugely, which makes sense given that our “normal” springs are often punctuated by large shifts in temperature (something absent from this cool spring). The vines are well over our heads, and the first planting has actually stopped producing flowers, simply because it is reaching the end of its life cycle. This is something we rarely see, since our peas usually get “shut down” because of heat (and heat-related pea diseases). The results are startling high yields, lush green growth, and tasty peas. Yum.
Probably our biggest disappointment of the cooler spring was the reduced amount of what we think of as predictable spring root crops: radishes, carrots, beets, white turnips … We grew some of these in our second hoop house, which is why you have received a few bunches this spring, but we learned that they really do need more outdoor heat than we would have anticipated. Thus, we have yet to harvest beets yet (such a sad thing for us beet lovers!).
Fortunately, we have crops of carrots and beets coming on, along with other “spring” favorites, such as broccoli (in this week’s share).
As they say — better late than never — but this spring has certainly shifted our expectations for timing. This week’s share really looks more like a mid-June harvest to us, but I suppose that as long as it all tastes good, then it’s all good!
And just a few other notes: our largest potato planting ever is growing vigorously, and the earliest varieties are blooming. The garlic is starting to dry down and we are thinking about harvesting soon. The summer onion planting is green and growing (and very well weeded!). And, all the pole beans are putting out their tendrils, looking for poles to climb (one of this week’s tasks).
All in all, things are growing. Hoorah! And, of course, the sun is warming the farm and the plants right at this moment. I hope that we will be staggered by the growth this month and next.
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Have you paid yet?
A payment installment was due to us by July 1, but I’m pretty sure a few of you out there were on vacation, forgot your checkbook, or were otherwise occupied. If you owe us a check, please remember to mail it or bring it to pick-up soon! Contact us by email if you’ve forgotten the amount or want to check on your balance due: farm@oakhillorganics.org. Thank you!
