It's hard to believe we're already halfway through the CSA season! This is week 13 of our 24 week summer CSA season. I had to check the calendar because this time of year we sort of have our heads down grinding it out and don't notice where we are in the overall season. We hope you've enjoyed your CSA share so far and we hope we can knock your socks off as the season progresses into different weather and different crops. It would really help us out if you took a couple minutes to fill out this survey about your experience thus far. We'd love to hear from you about how we could make the second half of the season even better than the first.
No, that's not Sweet Corn
We're plugging away, getting ready to transplant the first round of fall brassicas (broccoli, cabbage, collards). We hope the weather will cooperate with us, making the fall crops do better than the spring crops did. We've got around 3,500 plants to transplant in this first round with more to follow.
Have you been to the farm and seen the "corn" out front? It's not corn, it's a green manure cover crop called Sorghum Sudan grass that we planted to help suppress weeds and build the soil organic matter. It looks quite a bit like sweet corn, but we don't grow sweet corn because it's really, really hard on the soil, takes a ton of space and is difficult to grow organically without lots of ear worms. Sweet corn yields between 1,000 to 1,500 ears per acre and needs lots of added fertility (normally by way of chemical fertilizers which we don't use). To get an idea of how much space it would take to grow sweet corn, if we wanted every box to get just SIX EARS of corn on JUST ONE WEEK of the CSA, we'd have to take ALL of the land we have devoted to growing ALL of the the FOOD in ALL your boxes for THE ENTIRE SEASON including the greenhouse space plus 50% and plant it all in corn instead! I just did the math. Not kidding!
You can see why sweet corn isn't in our list of crops and why sweet corn and corn in general is such a big land hog. We're committed to building the soil and feeding our community and we can't conscientiously (nor do we have the physical space) devote that much land and that much fertility to such a low yielding and, frankly, not very nutritious crop. So rather than planting corn that takes away so much from the soil, we plant cover crops that add back into the soil and build fertility for healthier, higher yielding and more sustainable crops like cabbage.
Come help us with Garlic Trimming
The garlic is cured and ready to be snipped. This is a job that anyone who can use scissors can do (in the shade no less!). We're setting up a few time slots when we could use some help doing this. We have plenty of sharp snips and scissors and we'll be glad to show you how and chat while we do it together. If this sounds fun to you, you can sign up for a time slot here.
Cheese and Bread this week
Cheese: Hemme Brothers Garlic Dill Curds
Bread: Farm to Market Sourdough Artisan Loaf
Thanks again for being part of the CSA and please make sure to Take the Survey.
Dave and Sheri
