Well, the first week of the CSA kicked off with minimal hiccups or problems. It was SO great to see how excited everyone was to pick up their first share! Bear with us as we learn your names. It's something we strive to do every season! Apart from the CSA the work continues on the farm. This week the majority of our tasks besides our typical harvesting and washing consisted of weeding, setting up drip tape, and getting our tomato support infrastructure mostly in place.
The one benefit of the dry weather is that the weeding requirements are reduced slightly. That's not to say that we don't have weeds but that we're able to stay on top of them and once we get a bed or row of something weeded it stays weeded until we run irrigation or it rains. Weeding is an ongoing battle on the farm and if you've been reading our farm happenings this season, then you already know that!
For those not familiar, drip tape is a irrigation system where we lay out small hoses with tiny emitters at a certain interval that slowly drip out water over the course of a long period of time. It's one of the most efficient ways to water in terms of water use per square foot. This year, for the first time ever, we laid out drip tape on some of our long season outdoor crops like cucumbers, winter squash, tomatoes and peppers. In total, Dan put down almost 4000' of drip tape which will help us mitigate the damage the drought is causing on our farm.
We also got our tomato support infrastructure set up. We use large, heavy duty, tomato cages on our cherry tomatoes and a system called "Florida weave" for our other field tomatoes. Florida weave is basically a system of stakes where we use twine to wrap around the stakes and around the stem of the tomato plant to provide support to the plant as it grows and sets fruit.
Finally, we picked our very first garlic scapes on Friday this week! There weren't very many but we think with the forecast of rainfall this weekend that we should have plenty of scapes by the end of next week! There are a couple things we highly recommend doing with scapes. One is making pesto - the scapes provide a wonderful mild garlic flavor to your pesto. The second is grilling them with olive oil or butter. Cooking the scapes reduces the garlic flavor and they almost remind you of asparagus! Finally, they're great minced on pizza, or in eggs, or anywhere else you might use garlic. Enjoy!
