D&V Organics CSA
Week 13
We've been hard at work in the fields this past week, and while the weather for the most part behaved, the heat toward the end of the week was a little brutal for everyone. Our major accomplishments last week include a lot of bulk harvesting of vegetable crops, specifically potatoes, winter squash and onions.
At a point in their growth, the potato plants naturally die off and the potatoes need to be harvested. Luckily we have a machine that attaches to our tractor and allows us to dig and sift the soil off the potatoes, then droping them to the surface. Our potato crop was pretty good this year and we harvested several thousand pounds. After two days of harvesting potatoes, we switched over to our winter squash crop, butternut and kabocha. We sort of gave up on winter squash back in 2018 after routinely getting inundated with hurricanes moving up the coast, causing a significant amount of rainfall right around the time of harvest, typically late August/early September. On our farm, heavy rainfall itself isn't typically a challenge, due to our sandy soil, however, the rain initiates a plant disease that rots the fruit sometimes before harvest and sometimes even after harvest. Hopefully the level of rain that we have had this Summer won't show up in the form of the disease decaying our winter squash, which is now in storage. Winter squash needs time to "cure", hardening its outer skin and becoming sweeter in the process. We hope to have that available in a couple weeks for shares. On Thursday, we spent the day picking up our onion crop and setting it in our greenhouse, allowing it to dry out and become more shelf stable. The onions should be ready for shares in two to three weeks.
Enjoy, Derek and Crew
