Farm Updates - plus: Want to help us on the farm in the next two weeks?

Happy July! It's tough to bend the work of farming around holidays, so this week's farm work has run as usual. We celebrated our country's independence while farming for you on Tuesday, July 4! 

Meanwhile...as you can tell from the photos below, we're hitting stay-silly-to-stay-sane mode through the hot farm work days. Combine this with delicious food, dips in cold water, and vacation time for some staff members = this is how we make it through the peak of the farming season!
TO THAT POINT -- we have a couple of staff members taking vacation in the next two weeks, leaving us with short of the ideal number of hands and hearts working here. Our usual methods to find extra help has come up dry. If any of you would like to join in farm work with us for a day or four, we'd love you to help out! Ideal dates: Tuesdays and Fridays, July 11, 14, 18, and 21, 8:00-4:00. We have the flexibility to give you the standing-up-in-the-shade jobs! We pay in your choice of vegetables, bread, emotional gratitude, and/or money.  

Please reply to this email and we'll have a conversation! Thank you in advance for anything that may work out. We're trying to balance the trickiness of giving staff much-desired vacation days during the peak of the season while also trying to do all the farm things that need doing! 

Apologies for the delay in getting this email out with your draft Farm Shares. There was a little trip to Ortho OnCall this morning for one of us (me, Janet). Oops! It wasn't a farming injury, yet it impacts farm work and it needed attention. Unfortunately, it's also requiring a visit to a hand specialist tomorrow morning, so if anyone wants to help us out tomorrow, Friday, July 7th, we'll take you up on that, too! 

And it's now HOT and WET. We're glad to not enter drought status, but this has been a lot of rain recently. Whew! We adjust and adapt with the weather as needed and continue seeding, planting, tending plants, weeding, and harvesting each week.

Pictured above is our employee Siera using a wheel hoe to remove the weeds between two beds where we seeded Green Beans. (Due to hard rains, we got terrible germination from these Green Bean seedings, so we'll seed again and there will be, at minimum, a delay in our Green Bean harvest. Stay tuned!)

NEW CROPS we're harvesting now include...

GOLDEN ZUCCHINI - These babies are so tasty and beautiful. Stuff with protein and cheese and herbs, or slice lengthwise and grill or roast with olive oil and sea salt...They taste almost like candy. You can also make a raw salad with the zucchini sliced in ribbons. (That recipe calls for green zucchini, but our golden variety is more delicious and more gorgeous. It also calls for Pine Nuts but we always sub nuts that fit better into our household budget!)

EGGPLANTS - remember these beauties are best thought of as sponges. They soak up deliciousness that you put on them. We love them doused with olive oil, roasted, and sprinkled with sea salt. Roast at 400 F until their edges are a little crispy!

SHISHITO PEPPERS - These are frying peppers. Saute them WHOLE (stems and everything!) in the oil of your choice until they blister, then sprinkle with sea salt. To eat: pick up a pepper by the stem, bite the pepper up to the stem and enjoy their amazing flavor. So, so good. 

LUNCHBOX PEPPERS - These are snack size sweet peppers. We prefer to eat them raw, on their own, as a snack. But you can slice them on salads or stuff with cheese and roast. 

Heads up: Our slicing tomato harvest yield has decreased dramatically, so we have fewer slicing Tomatoes available for you right now. We hope this will turn around soon and will keep you updated! The next successions of plants look good right now, so we'll keep our fingers crossed!

For our every-other-week members that didn't get to read about our Tomato Grafting last week, here's repeat of that info:

We do numerous things to decrease the chances of disease pressure on the plants we grow. We alter the timing of the planting to avoid times of year when a particular disease for a particular crop is most common (some mildew diseases travel on the wind at a certain time each year), we purchase varieties of plants that are resistant to a disease that we know is problematic here, and we graft some plants onto root-stock that is resistant to a known disease. 

What is grafting vegetable plants?? (Pictured above = grafted tomato plants growing in our greenhouse after their healing chamber phase is complete. The plastic clip and tiny stake are still attached for support.)

Dan dove into Tomato grafting 10 years ago as a way to increase our tomato plant health and harvest yield. Grafting = this process: Seed two different tomato varieties on the same day. One of the varieties has very strong soil borne disease resistance but yields unappealing fruit. The other variety grows delicious fruit but is quite susceptible to soil-borne disease. When both plants grow to a particular size, Dan cuts the stem of each plant at a precise angle, tossing out the top half of the variety that grows gross fruit and tossing out the bottom half of the variety that is susceptible to disease. Then he aligns the bottom half of the root stock (soil born disease resistant variety) up against the matching angle of the top half of the delicious fruit variety and places a gentle clip over the spot where the two stems meet. Then the plants go in a healing chamber with specific temperature, humidity, and light. After the needed number of days, the plants are ready to go back to the greenhouse to get growing again. Then we plant them in the ground and hopefully get to enjoy the benefits of BOTH soil born disease resistance AND delicious tomatoes.   It’s a challenging and time-consuming task to do well, but a sweet reward when it all works.