I hope you are enjoying a wonderful Labor Day weekend! Even though the high temps have been in the 90's, it still feels SOOOO much better than last week. The cool nights make me think of fall, which is really just around the corner. The broccolini patch is looking fabulous and I know they're enjoying the cooler nights. We keep peeking, looking for the start of the broccolini florets, but none so far. We hope in two weeks to be harvesting a bumper crop from one of our fall favorites!
In the meantime we are beginning the baby ginger harvest now. We planted quite a lot this year but we've been disappointed by quite a lot of die off and less-than-rapid growth. This crop is really tricky to grow. Last year we did better, and the previous year we did worse. It's all about the soil conditions and moisture levels. They're a tropical plant, so they like it hot and moist in the high tunnel, but too moist is also bad. Still learning. We're beginning to harvest now, but I'm warning you that the bunches won't be as generous as last year. I wish it was gorgeous and huge. It's nice, and pretty, but not that big yet. As the weeks continue, it should size up and you'll see the ginger roots progressively larger as we continue with the harvest.
About Mistakes in Packing your Box.
We are still very much missing our excellent college student help as we readjust farm responsibilities to the remainder of our crew. This week everyone was still pretty tired but much better than the week before when we had both the dramatic reduction in available labor AND the brutal heat. We might need a week or two to get back in our groove so please bare with us. I'm pretty sure I made some boxing errors myself this week as we weren't as organized as we'd like to be with all our harvest numbers. If we shorted you something, please let us know. I'm happy to give you credit. We kept running out of items at packing time and having to run back out and harvest handfuls of various items. (normally we have everything already harvested in the correct quantities, but shorthanded we've been discombobulated and can't seem to count quite right) Heading back out in the field for a single bunch of kale or a handful of okra, is extremely inefficient, slows down the process, and often results in packing errors. Sorry about that. We're trying to do better.
Unlike Amazon, we don't have robots packing your boxes, and someone had to go out and cut every one of those lettuce leaves in your salad mix by hand with a knife and then wash it, and spin it dry and weigh it out in proper portions. We try to be as efficient as possible, but we are only human and we're a very small farm, so although you could call us "professionals" since we do this for a living, if you saw behind the curtain, you'd find only a handful of people, some of them quite small, doing all the gardening and the Amazon-like logistics as well. We strive to be good at what we do, and sometimes I'm frustrated with our errors, but I have to remember that we aren't full-time logistics experts like Amazon, who never seems to mess up their packaging process, we're regular people who are also doing a lot of other tasks to produce the living, healthy food that we all get to enjoy. So thanks for understanding if our frequency of errors has increased lately.
Bread and Cheese
Farm to Market Great Grains sliced loaf
Hemme Brothers Feta block
Thanks for being part of our farm community. We're so very glad to serve you.
Dave and Sheri
