I think a common misconception of organic farming is the belief that we all run around barefoot through fields of flowers and all of our produce is just naturally gorgeous and requires no inputs and everything just works out because we work with nature. Maybe on some farms that's the case, and if this is what your life looks like maybe give me some pointers, but our reality is slightly different. Instead I find myself running through grass taller than me, weeding things that I swore I weeded the week before, and cursing the pests that don't die off during the winter because it never gets cold. A lot of our produce does in fact come in perfectly and beautifully without any intervention required, however some crops are needy. They require constant weeding, and trimming and pruning and often a bit of spraying. Since we're organic we only spray our crops with pesticides that have been approved by our organic certifier, which means these inputs aren't harmful to our environment and they break down quickly.
We love what we do and feel strongly about our practices, even if they aren't always the easiest route. We lose a lot of crops to pests and disease and weeding is about 90% of our life, but we wouldn't have it any other way. Today we turned over one of our fields and planted it with new crops. Often when we turn over fields or gardens we don't use machinery to do this, instead we do it by hand. This means we weed all of the beds and then aerate the soil using digging forks. By not flipping the soil over with a machine, we preserve and maintain all of the microorganisms and beneficial stuff that already exists in our soil. This helps our next round of crops get off to a better start. Today we planted okra, onions, celery and basil so you can look forward to those things in the future!
This week we have lots of watermelon available as well as crisp asian greens, pumpkin, juicy tomatoes and much more. We love sharing our bounty with you each week and we hope you enjoy it even more! We look forward to seeing you all this weekend, once again if you could bring back any old boxes you might have lying around that would help us out a lot. Our box shipment got delayed a bit so we need any extras we can get.
Have a great week!
Elizabeth and the Farm Crew
