This time of year, there's hardly much time to get anything else done on the farm except harvesting. All of the early hoophouse crops we planted in the spring continue to bless us with their with bounty, and our field crops have hit cruising altitude. Successive plantings of most of the field crops like beans and broccoli are growing nicely, and it's all we can do to keep one planting picked on time before the next planting is ready. Sweet corn is looking great as well - I think we're about 2 weeks out from the first ears of corn! The very first field planting of carrots has finally sized up, and will be available in your veggie boxes starting this coming week. Sometimes it seems like we're just taking care of a crop for so long we forget it will eventually be harvestable. These carrots were seeded way back in April, if you can believe it. Thankfully, there's light at the end of the hands-and-knees carrot weeding, and this one has got an orange hue and a sweet crunch to it.
We finally finished hand weeding the fall beets, and will be moving on to hand weeding the final round of carrots for winter storage next. After weeding the carrots and beets, we like to amend the soil with some minerals and fertility to give the plants a boost, as you can see in the picture below. Those little seedlings have been battling the weeds for a month or more, and I think they must be pretty excited when the canopy around them opens up to blue skies and sunshine, and weed competition is reduced to nearly zero. They spread their leaves (little solar panels) to capture as much sun as they can, and once weeded you can almost watch them grow. We're too busy harvesting to take more than a glance as we rush past them in their fields, but we can't help but notice how their leaves stretch out a little more each day. Winter is coming, and they know it. It's grow time now.
Yesterday, we spent most of the day picking green beans. It's slow, backbending work, but we listen to our little solar powered field radio or chat and share stories while we pick to pass the time. Farmer Ryan told us that when he first started working on vegetable farms, his grandmother assumed that he was always "picking beans for the cannery," as this is what many young men did back in her day. Local canneries used to be a big deal in rural communities, and many hands were needed across the rural Midwest to pick all those beans to process. Now, those small canneries are no longer around, and processing plants are set up to take semi loads of mechanically harvested produce at a time. While I am saddened by the loss of local businesses that process locally grown produce grown on small farms, my back and knees are thankful that our entire summer is not spent crawling through a bean field picking beans for a cannery! Those old canneries might be a thing of the past, but the beans we picked yesterday are destined for a new kind of cannery. Spirit Creek Farm, another member of the Bayfield Foods Cooperative, makes jars and jars of lactofermented beans, carrots, beets, kraut, and kim chi. The vast majority of their raw ingredients come from small family farms like ours in our region, and we're grateful for the opportunity to supply beans for their products. We're also sending some of these beans up to Karra, who runs the processing kitchen at the Bayfield Apple Company. She will process and freeze them for availability in your winter veggie boxes later this year. Another great collaboration between the talented farms and farmers in our cooperative. We sure live in an amazing place!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
