I hope you had a wonderful Mother's Day! We celebrated at the farm on Sunday, with some good food and a few gifts for Franny. I would just like to shout out our Mama! Not only is she a farm share member, but Franny plays a big part in our farm shares. On Fridays, she delivers to all of Union Parish, Lincoln Parish, rural West Monroe, and Bossier City. It's nearly a full 8 hours! We have a lot of farm shares go out on Fridays. So Kaden and I are free to finish packing the Monroe orders when we load up her car by 9 AM. She is our number one farm fan, and we are so thankful to have a Mom who has always gone the extra mile for her family!
This Week
This is a really special week for Kaden and I! There are more farm shares going this week than any other week in our farm's history! Thankfully, we had a really good green bean harvest this week! There should be plenty in the inventory for everyone! New this week we have French breakfast radishes, and a select harvest of blackberries. Be on the lookout for an inventory update email that will go out on Wednesday after we finish picking. I'm always conservative with our inventory numbers, because it's better to have to many, than too few. The carrots this week will not be colorful, but will be the largest grade of orange carrots. These are for sure some of the best we have ever grown! We are trialing some new varieties of lettuce. This week, we will have a great deal on the Vulcan lettuce. It is separate in the inventory from the lettuce mix. We will harvest the entire head, and pack several in a 1/2 lb bag. We wash all of our lettuce, but just know that when the head is left intact, it's not as easy to remove every bug or speck of dirt during our post-harvest process.
Next Week
Colorful carrots will be back in a few weeks, but we have to sell all of the first succession before we move on to the next planting. I'm really hoping that any week now our squash inventory will be blowing up. Zucchini too, and cucumbers are not far away! We will harvest all of the beets soon, so they will come without their greens. PO-TA-TOES!!!!
Farm Update
Busy, busy, busy!! This week, we have two, part time volunteers/workers coming to help us out. Each is going to put in around 10 hours a week, enough to keep Kaden and I from having to work Sundays! I love being out at the farm, but dadgum, sometimes I need a day off. I can work all day outside if its below 88 degrees, but any hotter and I don't have nearly the same amount of fun or enjoyment, but hey, I chose this life!
I do have some saddening news---the freeze that NELA experienced in late March has had a SEVERE impact on local fruit farmers. Most fruit can handle a light frost, but it dropped to 25 degrees here in Marion and that flat out killed our 3 year old persimmons. Many of the early fruits had blooms at that time. Every mayhaw farm in Marion didn't have a harvest this year. So far, each farm I have talked to has been affected. Louis Thompson told me this week he will not have a peach harvest this year, and the plums will be scant from Farmer Dennis in Oak Grove. I'm trying to make connections with some other folks, but with those two farms, we know how they grow fruit and we have great respect and admiration for Dennis and Louis as fellow farmers. For the past three years, we have sourced peaches from Thompson's, and this Winter when we set up the shares, I made his fruit a big part of our advertising and marketing campaign for the farm shares. Honestly it makes me feel rotten to not follow through with promises we made to farm share members. But part of farming is letting go of feelings caused by factors out of your control. I'm hoping that we can have a good month of blackberry and blueberry harvests.
We trellised all of the tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, and peppers! This week I'm going to plant a lot of butternut squash. I also cleared out a lot of mustard green beds that we are flipping over to lima and pole beans. We are only at mid-Spring, but planting for our late Summer/Fall shares is about to get underway! September will be here before you know it!
Kaden and I are saving money for some new BCS tractor implements! We are going to purchase an attachment that will allow us to lay down and bury black plastic mulch, which will set us up for growing a large field block of STRAWBERRIES next Spring. It will also enable us to grow more watermelons, squash, early tomatoes, pumpkins and so many more crops that have been a challenge for us in past seasons. Your farm share investment this season makes every season that follows even better! Thank you for supporting our farm, and our passion for growing food for folks in our community!
