On behalf of all of the farms and food producers in the Bayfield Foods Cooperative, welcome to the first week of the summer CSA season! We're looking forward to a great season! A few logistical reminders for you:
1. Be sure to set your preferences in your member profile. If you like something a lot and want it in your box each week, rank it a 5. On the other hand, if you never want to see something in your box, rank it a 0. When you go to customize your box each weekend (the "store" is open for customizing your boxes from Friday when you get this email until Sunday evening) you can swap any of the items in your box for other items available, but the Harvie software actually builds your "draft box" on Friday with your preferences in mind! If there are limited quantities of something you really like, rating it highly will help insure it ends up in your box and not someone else's box (who might not really like it to begin with.)
2. Please return your boxes! We'd love to reuse them and keep them out of the waste cycle.
3. Regarding Covid-19: While we're talking about returned boxes, be assured any returned boxes sit in quarantine for a week before being reused. Furthermore, we are using best practices when packing your boxes - wearing masks and gloves, as well as frequently sanitizing surfaces in our packing area when we are putting your boxes together. Finally, please be respectful of any protocols your pickup site may have regarding safety. Please wear a mask when you are picking up your boxes, and be patient if you need to wait an extra minute while another person is getting their box to maintain appropriate distancing. We're all in this together!
4. Some of you may receive a free sample of some Spirit Creek brine in your veggie box. Attached is a recipe card for making a great salad dressing with the brine, perfect for these delicious spring greens! Also, for making salad dressings, we've got hazelnut oil as well that you can add to your box.
Here on the farm, it's been another bustling week. What a difference a day makes - yesterday it was nearly 80 and sunny, today we're back in the 50's. Summer in the Northwoods.
After the big rain this week, everything grew so much. The leaves on the trees exploded into so many shades of green. The strawberries are in full bloom, as well as our plum and apple trees, lilacs, dandelions, and other great pollinator plants. We even saw our first monarch butterfly this week. Our "rain gauge" (a bucket sitting out in the yard) measured almost 4 inches of rain that fell. The fields are still soggy but no crops were washed out, and all of them needed a good drink any way. We were chased out of the field earlier this week as we were hustling to transplant winter squash and more broccoli plants when all of a sudden the clouds broke and the first wave of storms drenched us to the bone in a pounding, cold rain. We hurried back to the truck for shelter, but by then the drops had diminished to a light sprinkle, and by the time we got back to the house it was sunny again. We rung ourselves out and got back to work in the greenhouse, trellising the tomatoes. Yesterday, we finally finished trellising them up and we're pretty proud of how nice it's looking in there now. Those beets in between the rows of tomatoes should be ready in a week or 2, and I think we'll beat usual first ripe tomato date by a week or more this year. Picking the first ripe tomatoes in June is quite an accomplishment in our climate!
With all that moisture, every single seed in the soil seemed to sprout at once and send their first leaves up to see the sun. The first field plantings of green beans and sweet corn and the second seeding of spinach all jumped up on Wednesday. Yesterday, we got in another seeding of sugar snap peas in on some high (drier) ground, and as soon as we can get back into the rest of the fields we'll keep planting and transplanting. We direct seed green beans and sweet corn every week for a month or more for a continuous harvest throughout the summer, and next week we'll start our 7th seeding of broccoli in the greenhouse. Time on a farm like ours passes less in days and more in successions of seedings so we can keep the weeks straight.
But as the summer closes in, our greenhouse is emptying out and we begin to shift from always seeding to lots of weeding. As you may have guessed, our vegetable seeds were not the only seeds that germinated after all of that rain. Just about every weed in the soil seemed to sprout at once as well. We've got a variety of tricks to deal with weeds organically here at Great Oak Farm, and tractors of course are an important tool in our toolbox. We've been tuning up our old cultivating tractors - a 1947 Farmall Cub and a 1948 Allis Chalmers G - to get ready for field work as soon as the soil is dry enough to cultivate again. This week we got the basket weeder set up under the little red Farmall Cub, but had to widen the wheel spacing out to accommodate this rolling weed-eating tool. And of course, to work on a tractor you have to use another tractor to lift it up!
But tractors are not the only tool we use to control weeds organically by a long shot. Tractors are great for weeding a crop once it has started to grow, but we've been using fire to weed fields after a crop has been seeded but before it has germinated. Yes, you heard that right - fire! Flame weeding with propane before the crop emerges is something we've been doing particularly with our carrots, as they take nearly a week from seeding until they are germinated. In that time, we cover the beds with floating row cover (also called frost blankets) and water regularly. This cover helps keep the soil a little warmer and more moist, a perfect environment for germinating weeds and carrots alike. After 6 days, we remove the cover and pass over the bed with the flame weeder. This kills the weed seeds that have germinated, and then in the next 24-48 hours the slower-to-germinate carrots will emerge into a nice clean seedbed. Like so many things on a farm, timing is truly everything. Wait too long to flame and you'll kill your carrots; don't wait long enough to flame and you'll end up with more weeds than you like in the carrots. This year, we missed the timing on our first seeding of carrots and have plenty of weeds to cultivate with that Farmall Cub, but got it perfect on our second seeding. Below, that's me with the flame weeder walking up the carrot beds. You can't see the flame coming out of the wand, but it's blasting hot and loud like a jet engine. Clean carrot beds are nothing short of magic!
Until next week - take care of each other.
Yours in community,
Chris Duke
Farmer, Great Oak Farm
CSA Manager, Bayfield Foods
