This week on the farm was all about control...namely regaining it! If any of you are gardeners, then you know that it's quite a bit easier to deal with weeds when they're small. Once the buggers have grown a bit in size, it's like they're roots have become little fists that won't let go of the soil and they can be very hard to remove. The same can also be said about pruning tomatoes (we prune the suckers off of ours to keep them growing on the straight and narrow single stem) pruning small suckers and trellising about a foot of new stem growth is a breeze. But once the suckers have grown suckers of their own and the new growth is more like 2-3 feet, then it can really be a chore to get that tomato jungle under control again. So the big accomplishments of this week were to prune and trellis all of the tomatoes and weeding the carrot block and flowers. The photo above is the happy smiles that come from harvesting carrots in a freshly weeded bed. Of course, since we spent so much time and energy on regaining control this week, we did fall behind a bit on planting. So next week will be about keeping control AND planting...and the season goes on!
It's time to customize your boxes for this week. I'm afraid there won't be any tomatoes available this week, but we're happy to say that they are starting to ripen (FINALLY!). So while they're not in time to make the harvest estimate for this week's boxes, we plan to start putting as many into the boxes as we can soon. We will likely be able to harvest some this week, and will have those available at market on Thursday. Be sure to check out the goods from other local producers:
- Honey from McLaury Apiaries
- Flowers and edible flower packs from Dragon's Breath Farm
- Bread and Bagels from the Gracious Table
- Eggs from the Miller Farm
Cheers,
Bonnie & Rudy
PS. We have two email forms of communication. #1 is our Farm Happenings (like the one you're reading now) that goes out to our CSA members - this is updates on the farm, but also CSA specific information that only goes out to our members and those on our Farm Stand list for extra boxes when the harvest is plentiful. #2 is our Newsletter list that goes out to anyone that has an interest in our farm - this is not CSA specific and generally gives updates on the farm and specifics about what we'll be bringing to market (it always starts out 'Hoot Owl Farm Friends...'). If you find yourself in need of more Hoot Owl emails and are not already on our Newsletter list, you can sign up on our webpage here!
