EXTRA FRUIT, AND VEGGIE ORDERING
As mentioned in our other e-mail, we are offering fruit several times this year, and next week we will have organic blueberries for you alongside your vegetable totes if you would want to order them. To order, either sign-up for a separate blueberry share (by going to our website -- springdalefarm.com -- and clicking on the sign-up button, and then sign up in the same way that you signed up for your original vegetable share, choosing your delivery day and pick-up site, and clicking on the "Add On's", and eventually paying with a credit card), or by adding it to your share as an "Extra" with this e-mail's swapping/ordering option. In either case we would need to have your credit card information on file, as paying by check is no longer an option for anything else that you might be ordering this year. As always, the Harvie folks are able to help you through the process, and can be reached at support@harvie.farm. At the same time, or even next week, you can order cherries that will be delivered the following Wednesday (the 31st). We do have extra basil this week, along with garlic, if you want to order them for making pesto. Or green beans for freezing!
DEALING WITH WEEDS!
Hundreds of millions of weed seeds lie in every acre of soil. And if even a tiny fraction of them are able to grow, and compete with our desired crop, the total harvest of our choice vegetable will be severely curtailed. One method of getting rid of weeds that have germinated is to burn them off. Here is our tractor-mounted LP burner that we use to burn (and thereby kill) the weeds that are growing in amongst the carrots seeds that were planted about a week before. So in an ideal situation, just before the carrot seeds are about to pop out of the ground, the weeds that are quicker to germinate can be eliminated, leaving an 'open' field for the carrots. Does it work? Yes, if the timing is right! Do we still have to hand weed the carrots? Unfortunately, yes! The weed seeds in the soil continue to germinate, when given enough warmth and moisture, so it's a never-ending, continual process. But at least we can keep them at bay, usually!
LOTS OF CHOICES OF VEGGIES!
We are getting far enough into the season now where we find many different vegetables are ready at the same time. And depending on how we enter the data into the system, your eventual boxes can look quite a bit different from other possibilities. For example, we have the choice of highlighting one or more vegetables, which would result in your box being filled with that veggie or those veggies even if you have not rated that vegetable very highly on your preference list. This will at least insure finding a home for a vegetable that we would greatly like to find a home for, or, in the case of new veggies, we want to make sure that everyone will get them, at least in the beginning. We can also list the veggies in different orders, with the ones being listed first having a slight priority of finding a box that the ones lower on the list. Aso, if we list a much higher quantity of several veggies that are needed to reach the value of all of the boxes, then there would be extras with which you could swap after we send out the e-mail, and more variations possible depending on your list of preferences. We can also change the basic unit amount of each of the vegetable, so that, for example, with this coming week's onions that we are just starting to harvest, we could specify that everyone who ends up getting onions get a minimum of two, or three, (or more) onions. Obviously, the more onions we would include in the basic unit amount of onions, the more value it would have, and then consequently the less 'room' there would be for other crops. Today we pore over the possibilities for a couple hours, checking out the resulting boxes that you all would receive, and if we don't really like the looks of the boxes that you would be getting, we continue to alter our inputs slightly, until we are satisfied with the results. Of course, with the swapping option, you can change the contents of your box again on your own!
