Welcome to week 14 of the 22 week summer season! Wow, does time sure fly by. If you have signed up for a Plus Add-on, this week you will be receiving a jam or jelly from Bayfield Apple Company as well as a bakery good from Starlit Kitchen.
This week on the farm, a new record was set. NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY, picks beans faster than me! On average, most people can expect to pick about 10 pounds of beans an hour. I typically average around 20# per hour, which is pretty good, but when conditions are perfect I can really fly through those beans. My personal best was 40# in one hour, motivated by a thunderstorm that I was watching roll in from the West as I picked frantically. This week, however, I have been bested. Farmer Eric is now consistently picking more beans per hour than I am, and he managed to eek out a new record with 41# of beans picked in a single hour!! It was a new variety (no flashy name, just a jumble of letters and numbers) but needless to say, we'll be trialing that one out again next year. This is the kind of nerdy stuff we farmers keep track of while we work... Another new variety (again, letters and numbers) will be showing up in your boxes this week, and it looks just as nice - long, tender beans, minimal disease pressure, and big clusters for easy picking. Let us know if you like 'em!
The other thing that keeps us going is great finds like this kraken of a carrot we dug this morning! Yes, that is all ONE carrot, and no we didn't grace any of you with it in your carrot bags this week. When my kids were little, they spent hours and hours crawling through the fields with me digging carrots, and the crazy carrots like this were treasured above all else. They would drag along a 5 gallon bucket and collect all the wild looking ones, and we would set them up on the table inside at the end of the day like they were animals. Fond memories of growing up on a farm!
Crazy carrots or not, harvesting all of the produce is an exciting part of the job, finally seeing the fruits - er, vegetables - of our labor. More cauliflower, both purple and white, will be available this week - check out how pretty it looks! The next planting of sweet corn is looking ready as well, so we'll keep that coming in your boxes too. Another new crop this week is fall spinach - our first planting of spinach is about ready for harvest now. You can see a succession planting of baby spinach just emerging from the soil on the right of the tall spinach. And one big weed in the middle!
When we have time, we're getting soil ready for the final cover crop seeding - you can see farmer Ryan here making one final pass with the disc and drag through a field before it is seeded down to rye and vetch for winter. We were hoping to get that seeded this week, but we've still got plenty of time to get it in the ground. Somehow the days are slipping by faster than our list can get checked off!
While it may seem like we're able to keep up with everything here on the farm, like it's all clean rows and butterflies every day, sometimes despite our best efforts some things just don't go as planned and take a turn for the worst. The onion planting this year looks like a hay field, thick with weeds and grasses as tall as your shoulders. When we planted it, we mistakenly put the transplants just a few inches too close between the rows, so our tractor was not able to get through the field to control weeds. We were able to hoe it early on and it looked nice and clean, but after we got busy with managing everything else, the weeds took off and the onions just had to fend for themselves.
Thankfully, the first 6 weeks of growth is the most critical time for onions, and during those weeks the field was pretty weed free. After digging through the weeds to asses the crop (that's the onion field behind those onions I am holding - good grief!) I am happy to report that despite the weedy mess, most of them sized up OK. This winter, once the crops are in and we've got more time for planning, we'll be working on how to improve our management to allow for better spacing and mechanical cultivation next season. But even after we adjust our planting plan, we're going to be paying for this mistake for several years. All the weeds that grew in that field this year are setting seed now- literally millions and millions of seeds! - and it will take a year or two of cover cropping and aggressive cultivation to get that ground back into shape for vegetable planting. Even after 15 years of growing organic produce, there's STILL always something to improve for next year.
Finally, I wanted to share with you something that farmers Eric and Ryan have been doing off farm lately - harvesting wild rice! After it has been harvested, they lay it out in the greenhouse to dry on tarps before processing, and let me tell you it makes my heart sing to see piles of rice drying in there! you can see what the raw rice looks like while it's still in the hull in the picture above. Before I was so busy farming, wild ricing was one of my favorite fall activities. A friend and I would hit the rice beds every chance we got, often times finishing the season with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of rice to sell. These days with a family and a farm, I feel like I have graduated from hunter-gatherer to stationary agriculture, but I still hope I can get out to rice again one day in the fall. It's been fun sharing the secret locations of some of my old ricing beds with these guys, and passing the torch to the next generation of ricers. Who knows, if they are able to harvest enough, we might be able to offer some in the winter CSA boxes. Otherwise, if ricing is something you have been thinking about doing, the season has begun, so clean out your canoe and get your knocking sticks ready. Happy fall!
In community -
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
