Cool, Dry Spring about to end... for June 21, 2023

We hope all the Fathers out there had enjoyable Fathers' Days yesterday! We tried our best to spoil farm dad Dan as best we could. He asked for mountain biking with friends, followed by swim time, chill time, and dinner-and-a-movie time. Dinner was coleslaw with our cabbage and homemade mayo, slices of our tomatoes, our grilled summer squash, breaded and pan fried Chicken of the Woods mushroom, and BBQ ribs from our friend’s farm. Plus he took care of some weeds and baby plants to keep the farm alive. We love this Dad!

Farm happenings: We'll keep saying it because it's so impactful on our farm: This has been the coolest spring we can remember. The result for the spring crops has been wonderful - the spring crops love these moderate temps. And yet it didn't get dangerously cold to hurt the summer crops planted early. Almost all of the plants are the happiest we've seen them! There are exceptions, and we had a very mild winter as well, so we expect bug pressure to be high this summer. (A cold winter makes some of the resident pests die off in greater numbers. A warm winter allows them to reproduce more/faster/earlier.) Our Eggplant crop currently has more pest pressure than we've ever had, so this brings us to one of our farming mantras: At any point in time, some things are thriving and some things are dying. (This seems to apply to life in general as well!)

This spring has also been uncharacteristically dry, but in ways that has mostly helped us. Often, spring rains are so abundant that our fields and plants have too much water. However, interestingly the past two weeks have each brought us a severe storm. The first storm dropped hail on us, damaging our Summer Squash fruits and our Head Lettuces. The Summer Squash have clear pits on them where the hail hit them. The outer leaves of the Lettuces are quite shredded. The second storm thankfully didn't drop hail on us, but our very close neighbors got quite large hail. We are so grateful! This storm did make us scramble to get our onions in from the field where they were drying before they got wet again (and then likely ruined) by the rain. We were mostly successful, and we hope these onions cure well. They are gorgeous and delicious -- and amazingly this is the onion crop that looked completely dead after the Dec 23, 2022 "Arctic Blast" that brought huge wind and 7 degree temp to our farm that one day. We were out of town and the wind blew off the protective ag fabric we had over the onions. When we got home, thousands of onion stems were completely white and laying flat on the ground - tell-tale signs of dead onions. Apparently with only one day of temps that cold, enough of the plant stayed alive deeper down than what we could see. We are so very thrilled to have these onions now!

We didn't get a photo of the onions from the field as we were madly packing them into crates and wheeling them under cover, but here's a photo of onions from a separate field that we brought into our greenhouse to dry:

And Onions we grew in a hoophouse and are drying in place: 

We continue to seed new plants in our greenhouse each week and plant new plants in our fields each week. Last week we got some more flowers in the ground: 

This results in flower bunches to light up our hearts and spaces!

Bread Share members: You'll get a SEPARATE email to customize your bread share in just a few moments. 

To Customize Your Share: 
Each time you are scheduled to have a share, you'll receive an email from us 2 days prior. It should have subject line "Time to Customize Your Share." The software will create a default share for you (based on your indicated preferences and what we have available to harvest) and list those default contents in the email. The email also contains a link saying "Want to make changes to your share or add extras?" Click on that link to customize your share! Customization ends between 6 and 7 am on the day before your pick up day (depending on the time of year and thus how early we start harvesting). The cut off time is always specified in the email.

For Pick Up:

EGGS: Steve Ault of Aults' Family Farm and Ring-a-Bell Farm in Pamplin offer their eggs for sale through us. Their chickens live on pasture and are fed supplemental non-gmo feed from Sunrise Farms. Their eggs are fabulous and we trust their farming practices completely. You can purchase their eggs in our self-serve FarmStand at our farm and you can order them through the Harvie system "Extras" when you customize your share.