Whooo, how 'bout that heat wave? Glad it's cooling down this week because our bodies aren't adjusted to summer yet! You gotta dig deep in the reserve to get out there in the sun at 95 degree's with 60% humidity! I (Dave) am an prodigious sweater so I tend to swap out clothes every time I come in for a meal so I don't have to sit in sopping wet clothes. Hang those pants and shirt up to dry and put on the crunchy stiff sweat-stained pants from the day before. wash, rinse, repeat...well maybe without the washing and rinsing. TMI I know. Sorry! It's just the laundry can't keep up with the mayhem of summer!!!
We spent our Saturday evening planting the first half of our sweet potato slips. We didn't want to plant them in the heat and have them die of transplant shock, so it was an early dinner then out to race the darkness to see if we could get 3,500 sweet potato slips planted in 3 hours. Yes we did it! Amazing what a family of 7 can do even if some of them are only 6 or 8 years old!
We'll need to plant another 3,000 or so in a day or two once the spot dries up from the unforecasted rain we had the other night. Anybody have a weather app that predicted that rain Thursday night because mine sure didn't! I watch the weather like a hawk because it determines so much of our work schedule and that one came as a surprise to us!
So gardening is what got us into farming in the first place and we love sharing the experience whenever we can. I wish our seedling greenhouse was big enough that we could supply you with more seedlings, but we barely (really don't) have enough room for our own transplants....But we do have extra sweet potato slips that we are putting on for extras. These are the same slips we plant for our amazing sweet potatoes. If you haven't grown them before, they're super duper easy, and really pretty. Back in the suburbs we used to plant them as a greenery vine in our front flower beds along with the annuals. Beautiful greenery then in the fall, we dug them up and yum!!
We'll only have these available this week as they don't keep terribly long. They're just pieces of sweet potato vine with a few roots and pretty sad looking leaves really. You would't believe they can grow but stick them right side up in the ground around one foot apart and wait until just before the first frost to dig them up.
Because of the demand for the CSA, we've nearly doubled our initial planned planting of sweet potatoes, but seriously, if you grow some of your own, that might take some of the pressure off your farmers to insure we have enough for everyone throughout the fall and winter. If properly cured, they store for 6 months easily, so a good crop to have around if you are expecting the apocalypse or whatever comes after COVID-19.
Also this week we're making available some Kimchi from our farmer friends at Fair Share Farm. Tom and Rebecca were like our KC CSA heroes when we first started farming and now they're working on a growing ferments business where they grow all the ingredients using organic practices and then process and ferment in their certified kitchen. It's great kimchi, maybe even better than Sheri's, but since we don't have a commercial kitchen (nor the time) the best bet is to buy Tom and Rebecca's kimchi. Not familiar with ferments? Oh my, you'd better google all the health benefits of living cultures to your gut biome. Super important stuff!
And thanks so much for all the help, guys! Its been hard to keep up with all the offers to help but it give us hope that we'll get some stuff accomplished! If you're ever available Monday mornings and want to help with the root harvest here's the link I mentioned last week to sign up https://www.eventbrite.com/e/where-the-redfearn-grows-natural-farm-tickets-106761869626
Thank you so much for being part of our tribe.
Your farmers,
Dave and Sheri
