What’s in the Box: Shallots, basil, cherry tomato mix, yellow storage onion, torpedo onion, eggplant, sweet banana pepper, green cabbage, red pepper, Anaheim chile pepper, concord grapes (bi-weekly only), and red russian kale.
What’s going on at the farm: Summer weather is on it’s way out and the cool nights of fall are setting in. We are working with it and digging in to some serious work cleaning up the fields and removing decaying plant material, mulch beds, drip lines, irrigation fittings, and mowing to keep the fields clean and ready for fall. We removed all the tomato vines from our larger greenhouse this week which involved removing thousands of plastic clips, twine leads, and composting all of the plant material. All the greenhouse benches were moved to storage for winter and our four seasons greenhouse is now fully tilled and prepped for plantings of spinach, lettuce, and other greens for fall and winter. This next week all this work will continue as we move on to removing the melon beds, summer squash beds, and clean up our smaller hoophouse by taking down many more tomato vines, clips, and trellising. Hope to have both houses planted with plenty of greens by this weekend with more than half our clean up completed. Garlic was a problem for us this year as much of the cloves rotted and did not produce. This has been a common problem this year for midwestern growers and we are attempting to source garlic elsewhere but not having much luck. We could have kept all our garlic for seed this fall had I seen this coming but alas it was all distributed and the search for reasonably priced garlic continues. It looks like we may have to cut down garlic production next season as a result because seed prices are high and availability low but I am working on figuring out our options at the moment. The sweet banana peppers this week are light yellow colored and the anaheims are dark green and some may be ripe red chilies. Remember they are a mild chile with some heat in the ribs, not the seeds. Some crops to look forward too in the coming weeks include lots of storage onions and potatoes coming in for the end of the season. Also braising greens, sweet white turnips, winter squash, and plenty of sweet and hot peppers coming. Hoping for a nice crop of ground cherries too. Most of these crops should make the shares next week. Thanks everyone and enjoy the shares!
