Holy moly, is it really September?
This week Hawkins Farm offered a regular old sneak peek preview into the CSA fall special: “Layers” (only on Max). The chilly conditions were yet another example of Indiana’s famous temperature dips, but the coming September had me imagining my first for-real fall on the farm. As we have learned, the farm don’t stop, which means that not even the slow deep dive into subtly colder weather will prevent us from carrying out our harvest routine. I’m no weather forecaster, but there’s probably one more streak of big hot days before there’s a whole-lotta coldness coming our way. Woohoo!
Speaking of a whole-lotta, this week sure required a lot of holes! I’m talking about dibblin’ (translation: dibbling). Dibblin’! Using a long stick with a pointish-shaped end called a dibbler, we dibble little holes in the earth when transplanting certain crops. In this case, we transplanted about 600 baby lettuce seedlings for yet another batch of the colorful Hawkins lettuce mix you’ve been munching on, as well as about 150 lil baby heads of lettuce that in three or so weeks will graduate from el-earth-mentary school and become mini-middle-schooler gem, romaine, and summer crisp head lettuce.
We typically roll out a single black flat with 200 miniature round cutouts, but this week we had to double our dibblin’ space to make room for another full bed of lettuce. It was Kimberly and I alone tackling this project, doing our dibblin’ dance up and down the rows. To dibble, you take your dibbler and insert the stick gently into the earth, apply a quarter-turn twist, pull your dibbler out, and then just do that, like, a thousand times if you are today’s dibbler. If you’re me, it can get a little fussy when you’re pulling the dibbler out, because it’s nice to see a tiny hole left behind on the ground, but the ground usually crumbles when you remove your stick from the earth; however as long as there is a dent just beneath the earth crumbles, there’s plenty of room to smush a transplant into the ground. The plant wants to grow, it only cares if its roots can nuzzle into the earth or not, not about such things like hole size, or even hole placement. We should be more like plants, right?
Sorry to take you down that giant dibbling rabbit hole, but there was a lot of planting this week, and dibblin’ is a huge part of planting! There were actual rabbit holes as well; we transplanted about 300 napa cabbage transplants this week, coming into regular contact with rabbit holes, making it ever so slightly more meticulous to add transplants to the earth. You see, when there is a long tunnel just inches below the earth’s surface, and the ground is wet, the mud falls through when you stick your hive tool in to make a slight opening for a transplant, regardless of how gentle you are with your opening.
It’s best to look fondly on nature in situations like this, because a creature is just livin’ its little creature life, doing its little creature thing, not wondering about your pretty, aesthetic plant beds, or your picturesque veggies when they are done growing. A mole, or a rabbit is like, “wow these potato beds feel like a good place to practice my digging! And look, there’s like twenty rows to dig through!” Or there’s the flea beetle who comes to life and just wants a big, fat, sturdy leaf for munching on, finding just the thing it’s looking for in a long patch of bok choy. Can you blame them? The bok choy on Hawkins Farm are the place to be if you are a bug, and the little holes in the leaves they leave behind is not their problem. We should be less like bugs and more like plants, right?
Anyways, the season is coming along. We’ve got all the carrots, turnips, kohlrabi, bok choy, beets, lettuce, and potatoes you could ever need, as well as the long, long list of offerings between all of our partner farms that can be found in Harvie while you are filling up your carts. There’s still a few good weeks ahead of us where the offerings are plentiful, but soon you’ll start to see some holes in the selections you’ve grown used to this summer, so get 'em while they’re green!
Looking onward towards the next couple of weeks:
Hey ya Brussels Sprouts, listen up! Tao from Bahn Mi Pho is gonna be guest chefin’ at pizza night next week. Her harvest special will have some Hawkins chicken, carrots, kohlrabi, and arugula along with cherry tomatoes from RiverRidge Farm. Some of the tomatoes will be sun-dried, and what the heck would a tomato pizza be without some basil pesto? Dessert pizzas are still going! Cross your fingers for enough apples from our apple trees for some crispy, apple flavored dessert pizzas. Woohoo! We’ve got four more pizza nights left before calling it this season, so like… come to one!
I’ve got holes in my boots, and a cat shaped hole in my heart that makes me want to just stop and pet the kittens, but we gotta keep moving.
-Alex
