It's getting super hot out there! I gotta be honest, July and August are my least favorite time of year to farm! It's a real challenge to get seeds to germinate, transplants to take hold and fruiting crops to set fruit, and worst of all, its just miserable! I much prefer winter growing:). We've even heard of farms that took July and August off. That'd be nice, wouldn't it, except you'd miss the tomatoes and peppers...so, I guess we'd better stick with it!
One nice thing about summer is honey harvest. WHAT??? Did I say HONEY? Yep! Our beekeeper harvested a whole bunch of honey from our hives and the other hives he keeps in a couple other yards in the Independence area. So we'll have honey for sale until it sells out.
Our water bill is high this time of year just because of all the water we're drinking to stay hydrated! It's high also as we irrigate the crops in the greenhouses. The dry weather has resulted in a lot of irrigation outdoors as well but we have a spring fed pond for that!
If you came to the farm late last week, you probably noticed the "new" additional walk in cooler we're working on getting online. This cooler will really help us out with storing the onions and garlic once they're cured and will make packing CSA shares much more streamlined. Previously, we had to empty the cooler of the stuff we harvested, pack the boxes and put them back into the same cooler. Sort of a dance and good luck finding anything buried in the back until we did the CSA distribution. Looking forward to getting this set up. Just need to do some carpentry and electrical work and it'll be a nice place to go on one of the 95 degree days (cooler is set at 37).
Just a reminder. If you miss your pickup, no matter where the location, our standard process is to put it in the cooler that looks like a shed next to the house. You can come pick it up whenever you'd like up until Monday around noon when we donate them to local charities. So far this year we've managed to donate more than 1,300 pounds of amazing organic produce! We're really happy that After the Harvest volunteers help us with distributing the donated produce every week!
Stay cool!
Dave and Sheri
