Week #10 - Reminder to pick up your vegetable boxes this week! The Farmers Market at Libby is requiring masks for all visitors and vendors, so if you are unable to wear a mask, shield or other face covering, please use the pick up parking spot right out front by the entrance and we'll bring your box to you.
It's a great week for Napa cabbages! As we mentioned on FB, it's so nice when a crop turns out just as you'd hoped it would, consistently for most of what was planted. Believe it or not, that's actually not so common. We plan for a lot of, not exactly 'failures'...more like less than ideal situations. There are a lot of variables that we can sort of control that affect growth: germination, too little/too much irrigation, transplant health, transplanting conditions, soil fertility, weed pressure. And there are many more variables that we simply CAN'T control: seed quality, weather, insects and disease, gophers!!, etc. Anyway, that's the long way to say that we were pleasantly surprised to see an A+ grade for this particular bed of Napa! If you're looking for inspiration, we can't recommend anything more highly than our favorite taco slaw base that's best with Napa cabbage.
We'll be riding to market in style tomorrow as our delivery rig 'Vanna White' just got her new stickers put on. A big Thank You to our designers (and CSA members) Jodi and Brady Turk!! Can't beat having artists in the family! And also a big Thank You to Stephanie Michalkiewicz who expertly managed the undressing and redressing of Vanna's logos. Stephanie also does graphic design, so if you have any similar needs, we'd definitely recommend her.
We are finding that it's time to consciously think about the heat of the day now. It's time to remind ourselves to drink plenty of water, it's time to start watching crops closely as we walk by to hopefully catch an irrigation malfunction before it proves fatal, and it's time to deploy all of the shade cloth that we can. We put shade cloth over our tender lettuce transplants for their first week out in the field and we are also going to be putting shade cloth on our plant nursery. It just starts getting too hot and dry around mid-summer for the microgreens and growing seedlings to really thrive, so we give them a break with a 30% shade. We hope you are all finding ways to stay cool during the heat! Looking forward to seeing you at pick up!
Cheers, Bonnie & Rudy
