FARM NEWSLETTER // WEEK 10

Greetings All!

I hope everyone is doing well, through what seems to be the busiest part of the summer! To start us off- we've got WATERMELONS coming in your CSAs next week!!! Please keep in mind that these are NOT in your CSA box.

We had a few options as farmers. We could choose to grow a smaller melon that would fit into your CSA box or we could choose to grow our favorite best-tasting varieties and figure out the delivery logistics and packing specs for delivering our favs!

We chose the latter! This is very important in our CSA Mission too- to get you the freshest produce available harvested at the peak of ripeness!! You'll see when you arrive to your CSA site that there will be melons on the ground next to the boxes. For Single & Family Shares, please take one. For Jumbo Shares, please take two!

Thank you for being a part of our CSA this season! As Members you get to see a big variety of fresh produce that we grow on the farm here, you see the day-to-day farm happenings (some funny and some not so funny, lol!), you get to see recipes and lots of new ideas for how to use and enjoy your produce.... but one thing I think we underestimate a lot is how much it connects us with the season itself- because there really are several sub seasons all wrapped up in one beautiful (messy) year of farming!

Being able to see the seasons change and having the opportunity to taste the fresh produce as it's coming into it's PEAK of harvest, is really a beautiful part of connecting with a local farmer. Think about this spring and how there were quite a few leafy greens, about how you may have tried the tops of the beets or carrots, radishes, things that you may have not thought of in the past (but are packed with nutrients!). Now we're cruising through melons and tomatoes, sweet corn, cukes, and we're diving into the fall... Eating seasonally takes a lot of effort and hopefully through this farm season you've been able to enjoy the different comings and goings of our favorite varieties!

Here is the purple cabbage for this week! Our larger shares will get the purple this week and the Single Share will get the green cabbage this week. Fun fact- The level of the purple color comes from the pH levels of the soil in which it's grown, as well as the pigment that comes from the nutritionally valuable anthocyanins it contains.

Very cold nights make for slow growth.

We've had overnight temps in the 50s lately which is concerning. It's really affected the melon crop unfortunately, where we've got a fraction of the number of melons in the field as last season for example which was exceptionally hot and dry.

Have you ever heard the expression "grow overnight"? Well, it's literal! During the day the plants are practicing their photosynthesis and collecting energy, only to expend it at night and grow in size. So an expression like "wow, the cucumbers look like they grew overnight", is literal because they do grow more at night than they do during the daytime.

If you have kids in school ask them the difference between photosynthesis and respiration and that should explain it a lot better than I can, haha! What I'm getting at is that the cool nights don't allow for the plants to make the leaps and bounds that they need to... So everything is growing slower (even the pigs, I swear!), because we haven't even seen any 60s lately overnight. Tonight the high is 60 on the dot, and for the rest of the week it's high 50s again. This is abnormally cool! Things are coming along, but they're just so much slower to ripen.

This is what I did today. We have one of our employees Bob, who comes out frequently on the weekends, and I even got my dad and his friend to help for a couple hours!

We need to pick a lot of tomatoes this week because we're behind. Usually we harvest in the rain or shine, but with tomatoes we really try to avoid harvesting when the plants are wet. It can cause blight to spread through the patch really bad, so we avoid even walking into the tomato patch when they're wet because it really doesn't take much to kill a lot of plants; especially when they're already susceptible because of how much it's been raining. So we waited until noon or so when the plants were dry and went out and got a handful of baskets picked. Then we sort them by color and grade (like we talked about before, number ones and twos).

Every day all week long we start with harvesting, washing and packing your CSA boxes. Then when they're all packed into the van, everyone goes on lunch and we leave for deliveries. When we come back from lunch it's a perfect time to pick 'maters because the plants are usually dried off really well by about noon. So this will be our focus every afternoon this week until we get caught up!

We've got a meaty CSA box for you this week!

In your CSAs this week you can expect:

Jumbo/ Family Shares: Watermelons! Cauliflower, Red Cabbage, Corn! Muskmelon & Tomatoes. Single Shares: Watermelons! Broccoli, Green Cabbage, Corn! Zucchini & Tomatoes.

PLEASE BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR CSA BOX. We know that there are a lot of heavy things in there, and your tomatoes... so we're going to be EXTRA careful not to rotate or tip boxes. We even pack empty boxes in the van sideways to make sure that the wheel wells on the interior don't cause any tipping. If you need to shuffle boxes around to get to yours, please treat it like your own :) We want everyone to go home with the best, thank you for your help!!

Watermelons are picked once they've ripened on the vine. You've probably seen that terminology in the store often because during the off season "vine ripened" is a big hitter (and good seller) for stores.

The process of a ripening melon is simply the nutrients and sugars in the plants being pushed into the fruit. The higher the sugar content, the more successful decomposition is, and that ultimately leads to better germination of their seeds the following year. So the more sugar, the better they reproduce in seasons to come.

This is also why one of the first signs in your home garden of ripening melons will likely be related to the vines dying or the leaves browning. As their wrap up their life cycle, they pull all the nutrients from every part of the plant and push everything they're got into their fruits, the melons!!

Muskmelons are coming in the Jumbo & Family Shares again this week! We'd love to take a week off of these so you're not dealing with two types of melons at one time but when they ripen, they're ready to go and we want to give you as many as possible before the season is out! We actually have another set of muskmelons that are due to ripen at the end of September, as long as the weather cooperates.

Cabbage! We'll have green and purple cabbage for you as stated above. The purple cabbages are generally smaller than their green counterparts. They're also a bit more dense then the green ones and have a bit more of a spicy flavor. You can use them interchangeably but just keep in mind that the purple cabbage have thicker leaves so they may need to be cooked longer than the green cabbage if used in the same recipe.

Your broccoli and cauliflower that you should be soaking these in a sink of cool water with a couple pinches of salt (or vinegar, that's what grandma swears by) for at least a couple hours. Make sure it's submerged.

Again, I'm sorry to share with you that worms like the same food as we do- but regardless of these little green troublemakers we choose not to spray them. When my kids go out in the field and take a snack, I'd rather them laugh about a bug then wipe away pesticide residue... hopefully you guys are with us on this one.

Sweet corn! This is one of those meal time staples that literally takes no effort basically. Boil some water, check! Put corn in, check! Viola, a perfect side for supper! Or if you'd like to get a little more adventurous there are some recipes on the blog page, just click the search icon and type corn. Let me also bring attention to the latest recipe I just posted- CORN RIBS. I've never done these before but I'm super excited to try it!

Zucchini is coming in the Single Shares this week. It's been a long time! The plants were dying back but now with our succession planting we have our second patch producing and we're starting to get enough to add them to the CSAs again. Succession planting is just planting the same variety multiple times in a season so you'll have it producing in good quantities all summer. We do this with many, many crops here at the farm. So glad zucchini is back!!

OK it's late (almost 9:30PM!) and I have to wrap this up. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that this blog post is late. It's Sunday night. I usually post Friday evenings or Saturdays but if you recall last week when I mentioned a whole new level of busy... that's now lol. We're working around the clock to get all these varieties harvested at peak ripeness.

Kids start school in about a week, but I'm really not all that excited. With how fast every summer goes I feel like they're all cheated out of summer break. This could be a case of mom-guilt too... They're good kids I just wish they had more time to be kids before summer was out. I just have to keep reminding myself that the start of school isn't the end, there are still plenty of things to look forward to <3

Stay well Friends,

~The Farmer's Wife