This Week
I'm really excited out farm shares this week! We are adding three new fruits, watermelons from Joywalk Daylily Farm plus cantaloupes and cucaloupes grown at our farm in Marion. The watermelons are all medium-large grade, some are 14+lbs with sweet, red fruit. Our cantaloupes didn't get very large, but they are very flavorful! We also have cucaloupes, which are a cross of cucumbers and cantaloupes. Their fruit is light orange, with a flavor that is a combination of both fruits. The core is hollow and the seeds are easy to remove. It's fun if you would like to try something new! The rind is perfect for making candy or preserves.
The weather has been really good for chanterelle mushrooms! We should be able to send out fresh mushrooms in the shares this week. We are going to harvest them every evening this week, and the quality has been excellent. There should be plenty! We harvested over 50 lbs just yesterday alone. So good news is that we will have a lot of dehydrated mushrooms to share with you, even after this farm share season is over!
Every week we are harvesting more okra. This was also a good week for tomatoes. Our third round of squash is poppin' off, so we will have a lot of yellow squash the next few weeks! We might increase the serving to 2 lbs. I also added Yukon gold potatoes for the first time, and we are nearing the end of our new potato harvest.
For the past few weeks we have offered dill pickles, well this week we have included bread and butter pickles! The regular and spicy versions are both available as add-ons or swaps.
Next Week
This will be the last week for colorful daikon radishes and new potatoes. Our green bean harvest might be ready by this time, but was impacted by the heat last week.
Farm Update
Last week was pretty rough. A lot of the effects we are feeling this week. We lost our retail lettuce, so that loss of income really bites. But we replanted more lettuce transplants on Monday. I am ordering some solar power equipment to that we can run some circulating fans in our tunnels. The "flash" variety of collard greens (1/3 of our crop) are all rotting, along with our very last succession of carrots. But some other crops are looking great, like cucumbers, melons, squash, peppers, and okra. It's always a balancing act.
We are coming down to the wire with this farm share season. I am so grateful that we had more sign ups than I anticipated, but amount of members who joined mid-season has pushed a lot of our crop numbers to the limit. Now that we are 4 weeks away from the end of the season, I am a lot less stressed if we are going to sprint through the farm share finish line the first week of August, or hobble through. I think it's going to be a fast run down the last 100 meters of a 2 mile race! This season has been the longest and busiest farm share season since we started farming. A lot of challenges have come down the line, but I think that we have had way more successes than failures--many of which were weather related and out of our control.
Our Fall season sign ups will be live soon! It is the best compliment when farm share members return season to season. Looks like we are going to start the next season during the second half of September. So the break between seasons will be about 4-6 weeks. This is the toughest transition period of the year, (the weather is so brutal) and we will need all of our labor and energy going into planting and preparing the soil to make the Fall season one of the best we have ever had! We have already begun planting, seeding, and preparing for it. Above you can see us planting butternut squash and purple hull peas for the fall. During this offseason, our farm's weekly income will be cut by 80% when we are not operating farm shares. Unless you are traveling, Kaden and I humbly ask that you not skip your share for the the next few weeks. We have both put in so much this season, that it would really mean a lot for us to have the peace of mind to plant for the Fall and not have to worry about hustling for money to pay for farm expenses during the 4-6 week off season period. We have the money saved to pay our mortgages, buy compost, soil amendments, and seeds but we still lack the rest of the savings to cover the day-to-day farm expenses for 4-6 weeks like water, electricity, labor, and fuel. A strong finish to this farm share season will make the next season even better!
