ADMIN:
TWO MORE PICKUPS IN CSA MAIN SEASON: Sept 23/24 and Sept 30/Oct 1
UPDATE YOUR AUTO RENEW STATUS FOR NEXT SEASON: Login to your account and you’ll see AutoRenewal Settings on your Dashboard. Or ask me to set it for you. We have already started planning for next year! Farming is a year-round project.
FARM CARDS FOR SALE: Best to buy our greeting cards on Harvie Extras, but I'll have them on the table in the Veggie Shed as well this week. Six different cards per pack for $15.
THE GREAT FREDERICK FAIR
The Great Frederick Fair has begun! It is a week of pride and a celebration of hard work and accomplishment for many hard working children and adults across the county. Kids put hammocks up in empty stalls and hang out all week between their livestock contests. We like to joke about putting out camp chairs to sit with our eggplant during fair week. We are so happy to participate in contests that require no maintenance on our part during their week at the fair, beyond a few happy visits throughout the week. You can visit the Farm and Garden Building to see all the ribbons and beautiful produce grown in our great county.
House in the Woods Farm ribbons from the 2021 fair:
Blue ribbons for garlic, sweet potatoes, Japanese eggplant, purple pole beans, largest sweet potatoes, and kiwi berries. We received a blue ribbon for our vegetable collection, along with the Horn of Plenty Award. Second place for butternut squash and fifth place for our pepper collection basket. Feeling gratitude for the love and positivity that the fair offers, a dose of reinforcement that the hard work through hard seasons is worth it.
U-PICK
Flowers are going strong. Enjoy the zinnias and pink cockscomb right after the zinnias.
The Bean Hut continues to provide! It seems to have had a prolific week. The best way to get beans to produce another round is to pick them thoroughly, which you have done. Keep it up, there are lots to pick now.
Candy Lane--the cherry tomatoes keep splitting and falling due to the rain. Enjoy the ones that hang on the vine. Picking a little underripe and letting them ripen on your counter might work best for this week. There might just not be many at all though. Check.
Kiwi Fruit--pick some kiwi berries from the arbor over the Veggie Shed. The squishy wrinkly ones are ready and sweet as can be. You can take a handful of firm ones home and see if they ripen on your counter, if you like.
RAIN RAIN
Perhaps you wouldn’t have noticed the weather as much if you weren’t connected to a farm, eating close to the land. It is hard not to sound a bit disheartened through intense heat and drought, straight into tropical storm rains. But you need to know too. This is what climate change looks like, folks. So.... it keeps raining tropical storms. I think we got 4+ inches of rain last week on Thursday evening alone. Wednesday was black skies and tons of rain too. We went from intense heat drought in July and August to a chain of tropical storms in September. When and if the soil has a chance to dry, farmer Phil will put the plow on the tractor and dig up sweet potatoes. We love to invite kids to help with the collecting, but we have to postpone yet again. Hopefully early October will work. We will keep you posted.
But you’ve been enjoying sweet potatoes already, you say? Yes, we make things happen with additional hard work when there are weather setbacks. Phil and volunteers have been digging sweet potatoes by hand, digging with pitchforks and muddy hands instead of the tractor plow. It’s slow going, but it gets the job done, so that we can have enough sweet potatoes to supply the CSA weeks in September. We’ll get the rest up when the soil dries.
SWEETS
Enjoy those sweet potatoes! No need for marshmallows, we grow the sweetness right into the sweet potatoes! Slow cooking sweetens the starches to sugars. Baking and roasting is the way to go.
