This Week
After one month of farm shares, I hope that y'all have been enjoying the vegetables! This week, we are adding lots of yellow squash and green beans!!!! I am infamous for using exclamation marks to create hype, but I'm beyond excited to incorporate some summer crops into the sea of greens. There are 10 lbs of potatoes available as extras, because it's still early and we have lots of greens to sell before they turn crispy. I love giving everyone a fully customized share, but with the approaching heat wave, we need to harvest lots of very specific crops, fast. I hope that you will consider keeping the bok choy and rainbow chard in your share. The rainbow chard we grew this Spring has reached a large size, making the leaves perfect for veggie wraps. I appreciate chard's neutral flavor, and it's slight crunch. It's a great substitute for spinach in any dish. The bok choy has been hit hard by flea beetles this season. Other area farmers have struggled with the same pests. They are a little beat up, but we peel the outside leaves, and give them a good dunk in the water bubbler before we bag them. I lowered the price, and we will add three to the bundle. You helping us avoid crop loss really means a lot!
I set aside some mustang grape jelly and mayhaw jelly for the shares this week. Next week, more jam options will return! Join us at Alley Park in West Monroe for the Homemade and Homegrown Mother's Day Sale! This is the only market where I have sold out of jam, so we are taking as many as possible. If you are around town, I hope you swing by our booth and try a few samples and maybe buy one or two for yourself and for a special women in your life! I don't get to meet many of you who pick up, so it would be great to put faces to names.
Next week
Big harvests will keep rolling in for radishes, chard, kale, mustard greens, squash, green beans, and potatoes. We will have a brand new planting of baby arugula receive it's first cutting! You could see the first kohlrabi of the season, and we will begin a selective harvest of the purple and yellow carrots! Fresh Ruston peaches will be available as share add-ons after 5/20!
Farm update
Whew, I feel like a bee. We have been flying around the farm this week, harvesting before the sun pops up, and getting the washing done by 11 AM. I cannot wait for this wash and pack station to be complete. We have a really busy weekend, both Saturday and Sunday. This warm weather anomaly has caught us unprepared. Today, I used the cash from the FTB market and bought ten BIG storage bins for the walk-in cooler. We harvested more greens this morning than we ever have. Tomorrow morning, we will harvest before heading to West Monroe, and on Sunday and before we pack everything on Monday for the Tuesday deliveries. Storing greens isn't something we normally do, but the harvest window gets shorter every day, and I hate waking up at 3 AM to go to the farm.
We have a solid irrigation plan, but it will take Tuna and myself a while to set it all up. I was shocked to discover irrigation timers that now connect to my phone via bluetooth! It's so wild. When it's over 90 degrees, each of our leafy greens is watered for 10 minutes at 10 AM, 12 PM, and 2 PM plus for two hours every other day in the early morning. It's a combination of a physical worksheet, google calendar, and 4-hose timers that have gotten me through until now. However, tomorrow we are adding two new spigots, which will really simplify things and keep us from switching hoses. Even though lettuce grows fast, we have passed the optimum season for growing lettuce the best it can be. We try our best, and take every measure possible to ensure that we can maintain a high quality of taste and crunch.
I've definitely been feeling a little stressed this week. It's relatable to the feeling of uncertainty before that first cold snap of the Fall. Everything usually works out fine, but maintaining high quality vegetables, while trying to be profitable is not easy. In the past, we have grown too many leafy greens for folk's liking, so they cancel a membership. We've made kale and chard bundles too big, or not provided an appropriate share size, so we lost customers who felt like they wasted food. We have had a lot of successes, and a few failures. But I feel like every time a mistake happens, we work to resolve the root cause, or if we receive a compliment, we ask ourselves how we can repeat it.
Members
We added eight new farm share members this week! I'm not sure if it's the brochures, or word of mouth. Regardless, we are happy to have you become part of our farm, and we look forward to growing food for you! We didn't hit our goal of 100 members this season, but sitting around 80 right now is not too bad! If you have joined since the season started, we really want to say thank you. Lately, the farm shares are more than covering our payroll, and every dollar is being put back into the farm. We are not far away from having some equipment that is going to make our work much faster and easier. Compared to when we started our farm (July 2020 be advised to not start a farm from scratch in the middle of summer), there really is no way we could work harder.
Happy Mother's Day! I hope our vegetables are served in many family meals this weekend!
Sincerely,
Conrad Cable
