We have a couple of new items available for your shares this week including summer squash and fennel. The summer squash is a mix of yellow squash, zucchini, and patty pan squash and is one of our early summer favorites.
This past week on the farm was marked by afternoon thunderstorms that felt like someone was playing whack a mole over our heads. We've had storms this week that dropped rain at a rate of over 3" per hour! These "gully washers" sure do live up to their name. We often have people ask us if the rain helps the farm and it is never an easy answer. We tend to get really picky about the rain - Drew always says that his perfect world would be 1-2 inches of rain over the course of 24 hours starting on Saturday after 5pm. When we get hit by a heavy rain storm the fields are not able to absorb all of the water at once and runoff becomes a major issue on the farm. We work hard each year to organize our fields and planting schedules to minimize the amount of time that fields sit "open" with no vegetable or cover crops growing in them. If a field has an established planting when we get hit by a thunderstorm we can significantly reduce runoff and soil erosion, but we still lose a good bit of topsoil between the rows. It is especially challenging at this time of year since we are hard at work prepping fields for the late summer and fall plantings - right now about a third of the farm is sitting open as we are building beds and laying plastic for the fall plantings. We are looking forward to some more settled weather in the forecast for the week to come!
