This week sure has been a scorcher. This heat is serious corn growin' weather, so it's no surprise that the first planting of sweet corn is finally ready to be picked! We gave it a taste test and dang is it sweet. The squash is ripening in the heat nicely as well - we are seeing some winter squash starting to get good color already.
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While the corn and squash are loving the heat, we farmers were not quite ready for all these 90 degree days. We have been perpetually thirsty all week, but working in the heat is finally starting to feel "normal" now. Even though it's been crazy hot, we still keep ourselves covered up most of the time with long sleeves and long pants. Keeping our knees covered while we are picking beans, and protecting our skin from abrasive sweet corn leaves while harvesting makes good sense regardless of the heat, but wow does it feel good to put on shorts and a t-shirt at the end of the day! We're looking forward to some cooler weather and maybe rain this upcoming week - the field crops are due for another round of precipitation.
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Great news for any cauliflower lovers: we have some beautiful heads of cauliflower starting to mature now. They are beautiful purple and yellow heads, mostly. We did plant white cauliflower as well, but it's being slower to mature.
Guessing how much produce will be ready to harvest next week for your CSA boxes is never easy, but cauliflower is an especially tough one to estimate. Even more than broccoli, it can go from just a little too small to oversized and starting to open up in a real hurry. We're being conservative with our guess on how many bags of cauliflower to list, but I wanted to let you know that IF you choose cauliflower for your box, on the off chance that we do come up a little short on cauliflower next week, we'll substitute a bag of broccoli in your box instead. Besides the 2 large plantings of cauli here at Great Oak Farm, Farmer Brian at Northcroft Farm also planted a bunch of cauliflower that will be ready for harvest late summer/early fall, so hopefully between the two of us we'll have you covered for cauliflower in the weeks to come.
Most of the other crops have been holding up in the heat pretty well this week, including the broccoli. We've got some nice heat tolerant varieties that are coming ready now, and we've been picking the heads a little smaller in this heat to keep them high quality. Hopefully after tomorrow, the broccoli will settle down and hold nicely in the field (and size up a little better too) like we are used to in late summer.
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One crop that has really thrived with the extra heat has been the cherry tomatoes. They are growing gangbusters and ripening nicely. If you are getting cherry tomatoes in your box from here on out, you'll notice that our new labels arrived, and we think they turned out pretty sharp! Believe it or not, there's only 4 more weeks until the average first frost, so savor those sweet morsels of summer while you can.
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I know, it seems crazy to be thinking about cool weather with this latest heat wave, but as farmers we are always thinking ahead, planning and planting that we keep our sights set on what is to come. I was worried about the spinach that we seeded last week in this heat, the spinach that we'll pick for your fall CSA boxes. Spinach loves cool weather, especially the cool nights - remember those nights in the 40's and 50's last week? However it can have a tough time germinating in hot temps like we had this week. We kept the sprinkler running all week long on the spinach to keep cooling it off and make sure there was plenty of water to germinate the seeds well, and it is starting to look like our efforts paid off. Those tiny cotyledons you see by my finger are spinach plants just beginning to emerge from the soil.
If you look closely you'll see many little weed seedlings (mostly wild amaranth - note the red stems - commonly known as pigweed) also starting to germinate, so we'll be sharpening up the hoes next week to clean the weeds out of these beds before they get too big. But whether it's weeds or crop seeds, no matter how many years I do this, every single time seeds germinate I can't help but crack a smile in awe and amazement. There's magic in those seeds. I swear it.
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One up side to this heat - it made washing microgreen trays a pretty attractive chore to complete! None of us really *like* washing all those trays, so we rotate that responsibility each week, taking turns to share the load. This week it was so hot that getting misted for a few hours while using the pressure washer actually was a benefit! This week it was Farmer Sean's turn, so while Farmer Alex and I pruned tomatoes in the hoophouse (yeah, it was pretty hot in there...) he donned his rain bibs and got them done yesterday afternoon. Once it gets colder out, we'll move to washing the trays in the greenhouse, but in this heat wave, washing trays outside was a nice job to have.
Well, that about wraps it up for farm news this week. Keep your fingers crossed for some rain next week, and we'll touch base again on Friday. Thanks again for making us YOUR farmers!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
