Lettuce Rejoice! August 8, 2024 - Week 10 Summer Farm Share

It’s Week 10 of the Summer Farm Share!

Administrative Details

*Please remember to return your cooler bags and clips:)*

You are getting this email to let you know it’s time to customize your share, you will have until 9:00 p.m. on Monday August 5th to do so.   

Here’s a how to file: https://harvie.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1260802865550-Customizing-Your-Box-

If you run into any issues, please email support@harvie.zendesk.com, you can also reach out to me at firmlyrootedfarm@gmail.com 

If you run into issues at your pick-up, please reach out to me at 519 441 1556.

Harvie University

Harvie has excellent help files on all sorts of topics, they call their help file database ‘Harvie University’, you can find it here:

https://harvie.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/115000048773-Harvie-University-Members

What’s in the Box?

Our second cucumber planting is coming on while our first is still going strong.  So we've got lots of cucumbers this week. Same can be said for zucchini (though it's our third planting that's getting started). 

The basil is abundant and gorgeous. 

The carrots are a little on the ugly side, but still tasty; sorry for the aesthetics, but the next plantings look much more pleasing.  

This week's arugula, spicy mesclun and baby kale are behind so we have very little to offer, but hope to be back on track next week.  The spinach and salad mix are awesome.  

Our slicing tomatoes and eggplants are not doing well.  I'm not sure why, it's never happened before (usually there are too many).  We are going to start pruning lower leaves and will try some foliar feeding (organic of course) to see if we can bring them along.  The paste tomatoes look vibrant and abundant and should come in mid-month.  The cherry tomatoes should also continue to ramp up in numbers over the next month.  We were a little short this week so have been conservative on the numbers but hopefully will update and increase once we pick them again.    

On the Farm

It's been an intense, but good week on the farm. 

On Monday I planted our storage carrots and beets, 10 beds of each.  Today, Brian flame weeded the beds.  When you flame weed you need the weeds to have germinated, but not gotten large, and the crop cannot have germinated.  Timing is everything.  You walk over the beds with a propane torch and fry the tiny baby weeds so that when the crop pops (hopefully a day or two later), it does so into perfectly clean beds and gets a jump on the weeds.  We won't know if it worked until we see carrots and beets but I have such high hopes. I can't explain how much fiddly-on-your-knees work it could save us.  

We also did a enormous field transplanting.  We put in the last of the broccoli, all the broccolini, the kohlrabi, kale, swiss chard, fennel, scallions, and of course, another round of lettuce.  It feels so good have so much planted and now we are getting treated to a beautiful rain.  Bliss.  

I've also been harvesting my first few figs.  I fell in love with these when I was a teenager and worked at a garden centre run by an Italian family.  I bought several plants last year but they didn't amount to much.  But this year?  Five figs so far and more ripening every day.  I bought another 24 plants, a mix of 6 varieties.  Perhaps that future will hold figs for all of you (though fair warning, but I plan to hoard them until I'm nearly bursting, lol).

That’s all for now, happy eating until next time,

Farmer Tamara