Farm Notes is online! This week we're talking about what we find on the farm... big and small, tangible and intangible. Please have a read!
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It is with great excitement that we announce: Canning tomatoes are available! Boxes will be $25 (about $1/lb), available Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays at the Vienna and Purcellville roadside stands between 10 and 4. If you are a CSA customer picking up on Tuesday or Wednesday and would like tomatoes, please go ahead and email to see if we might have them available on those days.
We can supply about 4 boxes per day, available by sign up only. These tomatoes will a mix of varieties, and will be very ripe and need to be used ASAP. They are seconds--expect some bad spots and blemishes.
To reserve your boxes, please email becky@potomacvegetablefarms.com with your order and note:
Your name,
What day you would like to pick up your tomatoes,
How many boxes you would like, and
What roadside stand you will be picking up at (Purcellville or Vienna).
Once I email you back confirming we have them available at the time you wish, you're all set! We should have tomatoes for about three weeks or so.
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Whenever you are doing something engaging, something that takes your full attention, time speeds by. Last weekend every person who came home from working at the farmers market said, "Wow--I couldn't believe it was already noon! We didn't have time to take a breath and the morning just flew by." That's kind of how the summer is feeling. We are officially on the downward slope, moving away from the midpoint. Olivia, who is in her third season here, said to me this morning, "I can't believe you say that this is now an easy slide down from the peak. Fall is HARD!" What she is forgetting is that the days are getting shorter and the nights are cooler already. How hard can it be if we are going to get more and more rest, with each week?
Here is what we have left to tackle this season, other than the normal daily tasks of picking and washing and packing and loading:
Plant the rest of the fall crops, both plants and seeds
Plant the cover crop for fall and winter
Finish digging the potatoes--we are halfway done.
Harvest all the winter squash
Harvest all the sweet potatoes
Harvest all the fall root crops (that we haven't quite planted yet)
Clear the fields of irrigation, tomato stakes, other structures
We still have a lot of tomatoes to pick before early September, and that is our short term focus. But that list is so much shorter than the one we had four months ago. We are speeding through these days, and every day in August that is cooler than normal is a gift.
