The photo above shows us planting out our final bed of salad mix for the season. Time will tell if we planted it soon enough to get a harvest out of it, but we're hoping our timing was spot on this time. With the help of being planted inside a hoop house and also some row cover during cold snaps, hopefully this will the the last salad we'll have available close to (or into) November! For those that like to know the numbers... We planted 105 beds of salad mix greens this year. That's almost exactly a 1 mile salad mix sidewalk, OR if you stretched the plantings out into a single row, it would be 4 miles of 42,000 lettuce heads!! We're happy to have our planting done so that we can focus on the next round of tasks. The most pressing is to free up the remaining beds under cover so that we can direct seed crops like spinach and arugula into them. But a closely following second priority is to clear out entire blocks in our field so that we can get cover crops seeded in time to establish this fall. Namely, we want to plant a couple of blocks of our vetch/crimson clover cover crop mix so that next Spring it'll take off and grow a lot of biomass to be incorporated into our future fall root crop beds. Its kind of poetic really that at the exact time as we're always scrambling to find space to plant this cover crop, we're also always scrambling to harvest THIS year's fall root crops because people are wanting those big bags of carrots for the winter! But we're playing the long game, so we're balancing the urge to spend all our time harvesting and selling so that we set ourselves up well for next year too.
Did you see our recent article in the Western News? We'd like to thank Hannah Chumley for coming out and visiting with us and for writing a great piece. She couldn't have had better timing, because Hannah showed up for a surprise visit just as we were welcoming you guys out to the farm on CSA member appreciation day a couple of weeks ago. So we'd just finished sprucing up the place a bit!
Is this the last official CSA pick up of the season? YES! Does that mean this is the last Hoot Owl email you'll be getting? NO! We'll be in touch to let you know where we'll be and how you can continue getting our produce until the bitter end of the season (i.e. Farm Stand boxes, pop-up markets, etc). So in a nutshell, don't forget your pick up this week, but you won't BE ABLE to forget us because we'll still be around and sending you emails for a while yet!
We look forward to seeing you all soon, and THANK YOU so much for being CSA members this season. Our CSA is a huge part of our farm and we simply wouldn't be in business if it weren't for all of your support!
Cheers, Bonnie & Rudy
