Pictured Above: Beatrice, one of the 4 lovely ladies responsible for your flowers each week, unloads dahlias.
Sorry about last week's newsletter everyone. I hit save after 45 minutes of work and didn't realize that somehow it failed to save. :( Here's an attempt at a quick re-cap.
Last week's photo was of some of our re-purposed potatoes at Pacific Elementary School's famous "Potato Night". Known to be the best Potato Night in the country- where everything potato is celebrated. Potatoes are eaten, decorated, and people dress as potatoes.
I also thanked everyone who has offered help after my midweek whining session about how understaffed we are. We are soooo grateful for all of you and your well wishes. It breaks my heart that what should be so simple and good (accepting help from neighbors and community members) is encumbered by regulations that rather than protect us in this case, get in the way of community building. As we are a for profit organization, we are legally no allowed to accept volunteers. Everyone who helps must be a minimum wage employee. In addition we have had the experience of our Liability Insurance company scouring our social media posts and then sending us cease and desist or we will drop your coverage messages if they think the risk of visitors is too high. We are allowed to have people on the farm, but they limit then number of events we have and apparently check up on what we're up to. Finding liability insurance with our diverse operations is no joke, it took a fair bit of effort to find a company that wanted to assume the "risk" of taking us on as we have both baby greens and chickens. Sigh... That said, we really would like to have all of you out to visit, see what we're going, and enjoy this beautiful place that you are helping to keep operating. Stay tuned.
Product Updates: Tomatoes are available in 10 and 20lb flats for those of you who want to can, freeze, dry, or just gorge yourselves on dry farmed deliciousness. Melons are waning. Another week with a fair number then maybe just a few more after that. Pepper mania is only just getting started. We grew alot of different types this year as the last 3 years we've lost most of our peppers to Tomato Mosaic Virus. So this year we planted our favorites and then also planted a bunch of varieties that are resistant (the bell peppers and sweet bananas). But all of them are doing amazing this year.
We are having a rough apple year. Many of the varieties what have been heavy hitters in previous years are severely damaged by what we think are a type of fruit fly. Little speckles all over the skin, making them unsellable. But, viva la diversitee! The Arlet look stunning this year and are soooo delicious. This is part of why we believe in diversity- diverse crops are critical to organic management from crop rotation to control disease instead of chemicals to resiliency to shifts in what crops sell well and what crops do well depending on particular weather and pest pressures in a given year.
Arlet- Golden delicious & Idared cross. Intense complex flavor, sweet, spicy undertone. Aromatic, good for cooking.
Also in season right now are Bartlett pears. Bosc will be ready in another week or so too.
Been buying Root Down Farm chicken and Pork? Want to catch up and learn more about our wonderful neighbors. Here's a link to their latest newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/6c0c52ccdf00/open-farm-days-8766233?e=60ac76024f
(hope this works.. I haven't tried linking to a mailchimp newsletter before)
