The Fall Carrot Crop

The past two days have been all about carrots. Monday we spent the day digging 4 beds of carrots, removing the tops, getting off the excess mud and putting them into crates. The weather was cool and cloudy with occasional sunny breaks which were very nice as the sun warmed us up. Otherwise we were cold.

Tuesday afternoon was spent washing the carrots. It was a lot warmer Tuesday than it was Monday and sunny to boot. So the job was not too bad, though getting soaked from the waist down in 50F weather is not exactly my idea of fun. But it was certainly more fun than doing this job in 45F or colder weather.

The mud did not want to come off the roots but with enough water pressure any thing is possible and I ended up with 7 full crates of field washed carrots. Field wash means 99% of the dirt is off of them but they are not 100% clean.

We have a primitive wash station. It consists of a hose and a metal stand to put a crate on. Oh, and I use empty dirty crates to put crates full of dirty carrots on so they are not directly on the ground (keeps things sanitary and also keeps slugs from crawling into the crates and eating holes in the carrots). What I do is first spray down the crates full of dirty carrots to get the dirt on them wet. This is a kin to soaking them. Than I grab a full crate of wet, dirty roots and dump about 1/6th of the contents (maybe 10 pounds) into the cleaning crate (which is any empty crate that is on the metal stand) and spray the carrots off, making sue to roll them around so all surfaces are washed. Than I dump them into a clean crate for storage. Repeat that about 40 times and you have 7 crates of clean carrots ready to be bagged up for sale.

It's a good thing we dug the carrots when we did. They were all harvested because we were under the impression that it was going to get really cold and start snowing. At least that was the forecast 5 days out for this week. As it has turned out it will rain today and it will dip below freezing at night from here on out but it looks like we will not get 12"+ of snow nor will the soils freeze up any time soon (like in the next 10 days). But despite the lack of winter we are finding a lot more damage on the carrots vs the last time we harvested them, about 10 days ago. Up until this final carrot harvest I would say the damaged carrots made up less than 1% (and some weeks there was zero damage). But this batch had around 5% damage, mainly from slugs, though a few carrot tops were chewed off by mice or bunnies. 5% is not bad at all for damage. The summer carrots had around 50% damage from mice and voles and carrot maggots. The summer carrots also were not nearly as big and beautiful nor did they have the wonderful sweet flavor of these fall beauties.

But as I was saying, it is good we got these carrots out when we did because I believe we would have seen a lot more damage from the slugs and mice had we left them in another 5 to 7 days. It was obvious to us that the critters are getting hungry and would have started dining on the carrots in earnest very soon. But now the carrots are safely put away out of the reach of the vermin and ready to be sold to SW Ohio and EC Indiana Locavores and distributed to our farm share members

New Book Listings!

In Honor of Black Friday (which I will not attend, I shall be in the bosom of my family that day, well away from the Malls and shops. Plus it is Buy Nothing Day) I have listed new titles and things for you to peruse and purchase for a Christmas present or for yourself. Look to the right hand side bar for the new titles. Click on any that interest you and you will be swept away to the Amazon website where you can purchase the item(s). Know that Boulder Belt gets a small % of each sale that comes from this blog and that that money supports what we do. So buying from Amazon via this Blog supports a small diversified sustainable farm.

3 of the titles are Eliot Coleman classics on market farming and season extension. If you grow for market or are into hoop houses so you can grow almost year round, if not year round, and do not have these books you need them. They really are a "must have" for your farm and garden library.

Solviva is a book about an interesting experiment that no longer exists. Ana Edy took her house Solviva and made it into a living breathing entity. But her success took her away from Solviva and it eventually died. But the book is about how this worked for many years and is full of ideas for the rest of us.

The Aerogarden I have not used but I have seen them and they are a wonderful idea for people who want to grow year round but do not want to fuss with big old hoop houses, snow loads and other issues one has with winter growing outdoors. And I have a listing for the seed pods too.

The Handbook of Organic Pest Control is one of my favorites. I use this book a lot. Well written and well organized.

The new Farmers market is for anyone who is thinking of starting a farmers market or selling at one. It is really two books in one, as it looks at farmers market from both the management perspective and the vendor perspective. I own this book and my copy has helped to start two farmers markets and has helped Boulder belt with marketing techniques. This is an essential book for everyone involved in farmers markets in any way shape or form

The Moosewood Cookbook. My favorite cookbook ever. The recipes are simple and tasty. I got my copy at least 20 years ago from My sister, Maggie and I still make good use of the book to this day.

Eugene Finds Truffles

Who woulda thought we would find truffles near a shag bark hickory tree in a potato bed. But we did.

We are not 100% they are truffles but from looking through the mushroom book we have and checking several places on line plus looking at a lot of images on google they really can't be anything else.

And they smell. A very strong moldy earthy smell like a cabin in the woods stuffed with woolen items that has been shut up for a long time. Not exactly pleasant. But they may well be interesting to eat. But what if they are the one yet to be discovered poisonous truffle. The evil anti-truffle if you will. if that is the case than we would get very sick or even dead from eating the truffles.

Yeah, Mushrooms can be scary if you are not 100% sure what you have.

So we have a mystery. These could be the rare and valuable Oregon White Truffle or not. Need to do some more research.

Here is what they look like

Not rocks, truffles!

This one is cut open. the inside spores are brown and may be mottled. the fungus itself is less than a cm across. these are not big truffles by any means.

Boulder Belt and the Choice Food Pantry

Many years ago when I was still on the Oxford farmers Market Uptown governing board I made the suggestion that we should figure out a way to get the left over food that farmers have at the end of every market to people who need food, i.e. a food pantry. Everyone on the board thought that was a great idea and voted it in. And we thought from there it would be easy to set up a system to get food from market to the needy.

Not so. It seems that at the time none of the local food pantries around Oxford (there were two at the time-family Resources and the Food Pantry of St Mary's/St Vincent dePaul. These merged in 2007 to form The Choice Pantry) had much, if any, refrigeration and were not open on Saturdays and had no real way to deal with perishable fresh foods. There also was no one to pick up the food and take it where it needed to go.

The first couple of years were hit and miss. It was obvious it was up to the farmers market to get things together such as coolers and humans to get the job done and this happened (we have a really great support system and community with this market). But it was not possible to find people every week to pick up food from the vendors and take it to the food pantry location and I know on at least one occasion the food pantry forgot about the Saturday delivery and the volunteers had no way to deliver the food. And there was also the issue that the needy people who were getting this food were not familiar with much of the produce being donated like arugula, heirloom tomatoes, specialty peppers, eggplant, daikon, fennel, etc., etc.. So they were not using the food and it often went to waste.

But that was 4 or 5 years ago. Than in 2007 the two pantries merged into Choice Pantry, run by St Mary's Catholic Church. They are well run and have refrigeration (because they knew about us farmers when they set this new pantry up and made sure they could utilize us). And they have Miami students hold classes to teach the food needy about cooking, nutrition, etc., so these people can use the food from the farmers market (more utilization). And we have Mike coming by just about every Saturday at noon to gather together food that would other wise be wasted (okay not exactly wasted as we and most other farmers at the market would do something like compost the produce or feed it to livestock-it would not be land filled in most cases) and he takes that food to the pantry for distribution that very day (unlike the past where the fresh food would sit around until Monday before distribution). It has become a very workable system.

So we have been donating a lot of food most weeks. Most weeks the pantry gets about 3 bushels of food. I think there have been only 2 or 3 weeks where we did not have much of anything left to give (and what we had was probably too weird for the food pantry-we do grow and sell a lot of unusual varieties). Over the season we have probably donated more than a ton of food.

It feels good to be able to do good works but it sure ain't easy to get these good works started up. But happily, in Oxford, OH they have it figured out.

The Wisdom Of Growing Berries Workshop

On Wednesday we went to Columbus Ohio to the 4-H building (or the 4-H mother ship) to the Wisdom of Growing Berries workshop. If you remember we had a farm tour back in August. That was stage one of the Wisdom of growing Berries and this meeting in Columbus was the second and final stage. This was all about sharing our knowledge with beginning farmers and farmers getting into berries. I saw quite a few people I know who are definitely not beginning farmers but I guess felt they needed more knowledge.

I was very pleased to see Kristi Fisher there. We met in 2000 when we both sold produce at the Dayton Second Street Market (which neither of us does currently). We see each other it seems about once a year, though I think it has been about 3 years since our last meeting. Any hoo we had a nice chat about chickens when we should have been talking berries-oh well...

Eugene and I went to the event as "Mentors" and sat on the afternoon panel. I gotta say I learned a from both the mentor panel and the new grower panel. Lots of good insights from both groups. I found that once again I felt kind of behind the other Mentor growers as we have not made good use of extension/OSU research. But considering most of the research is for the chemical farming crowd I have avoided it. But I was made aware that there is much there for the organic growers as well. If nothing else, pictures of pests and diseases and links and references to other sites.

But back to what we did. We sat on this panel of 5 mentor farmers and we were asked three questions and each of us had five minutes to answer each question. Most of us went over time, some way over time. But it was all useful information. After the panel discussion was over we broke into small groups. There were 43 participants plus the panel members so around 50 people in all. I know a few people left before the afternoon stuff started taking down the numbers. Unfortunately we only had about 25 minutes to talk in these small groups. There is so much to say and teach and rarely enough time to do it at these events.

But Sharon Sachs, the woman who put on this event for IFO, at the end had a solution to the not enough time to teach problem-she wants to pair up beginning and struggling farmers with experienced farmers in a mentor program. We have had apprentices and interns on the farm but this is a bit different. In this case we would get paid by the mentee to teach them what we know. it is up to them to initiate the contact and tell us exactly what they want to learn and than we go from there. Several farmers in the room had been on both sides of the table and the # 1 thing I got from this is don't trade work for information. Charge money for the information.

In the past we have done this mentoring thing a bit and always were disappointed because we would trade information for work but found that we spent a lot of time training the person to do the work and in the end it slowed us down too much. these people said if you do trade work for education than have that work be something big and something you do not really want to do like clean out a livestock barn-something you might pay someone an hourly wage to do for you. But do not include any chores that you are teaching. As one guy said he did not want any students pruning his blueberries but he is more than willing to travel to their farm to show them how to prune on their berry plants. In other words he does not want these people working on his farm and making their mistakes on his farm. Good policy.

I have no idea if we will be come mentors to anyone from this event. We are willing but have yet to be contacted

Planting the 2009 Garlic Crop

Planting garlic on a beautiful Indian Summer evening

We started planting garlic this past Tuesday. We are planning on doing 8 50' x 4' beds this year and growing 5 different types, Music, Purple Glazer, Shvilisi (Chesnok Red), Persian Star and German White-all hardneck garlics. The Persian Star, Shvilisi and German white we have grown for years. Last year I traded some rare tomato seeds for the Music and Purple Glazer and we planted the 3 corms of each last fall and got 41 corms of the Glazer and 31 of the Music which translated into 1.3 beds of the Purple Glazer and .6 beds of the Music. We also planted two beds of the Persian Star.

It took an amazingly short amount of time to get the garlic positioned and in the ground. Around 45 minutes a bed with 2 people laying out and planting 450 cloves per bed. Granted, the beds were ready to go. The tilling, raking and applying compost and other amendments would have added another 45 minutes to an hour of time. Though we did put down Sul-Po-Mag right before planting and that took maybe 2 minutes per bed.

Sul-Po-Mag

At any rate, between 4pm and dusk we planted over 1500 cloves of garlic. Our best time to date. We still have another 1300 to put in whenever it decides to not rain and we get a good day for planting root crops.

Eugene using a rake to mark out rows in the bed

Garlic needs to be planted in the fall. Usually we plant between Halloween and Thanksgiving but this year we had our first freezes in Mid October and the Sella Natura Biodynamic planting calender we use indicated that Tuesday afternoon and evening was a terrific time to plant root crops. So Eugene spent the day harvesting potatoes and doing the final prep on the garlic beds while I got the farm share stuff together. Than around 4pm I went up to see where the garlic planting was headed. Saw Eugene was just beginning to poke the first garlics into the ground and so I grabbed a trowel and started doing the same.

Laying out the garlic. This bed is finished and ready for planting.

While we were planting our garlic crop our neighbors were taking out their soy bean crop. The difference between how we farm and how they farm was striking. We were doing a human scale farming project. Our tools were a couple of buckets, some Sul-po-mag and garlic. They were doing and industrial machine scale farming project. Their tools were a combine with a bean head, a tractor with a gravity wagon and a semi tractor trailer. They were covering lots of acres (I believe the field next to us is 25 acres) while we were covering a small space, maybe 800 square feet at most. And yet we will likely net more money from our small space in garlic than they will on that 25 acres. And we do this having used a small fraction of the energy used in the industrial machine scale farm project.

Took a break after one bed and found that we had been doing this job for under 30 minutes and at that pace we could likely get another 5 or 6 beds done before dark. Drank a beer and sat around for 20 minutes breaking up German White corms into individual cloves because we felt we could plant another 6 beds before dark in 1.5 hours. After a few minutes we realized we really had time to do only 3 more beds as we realized that we had not accounted for laying out the garlic. That that task can sometimes take almost as long as poking the cloves in the ground. Plus we did not have enough garlic prepared for planting to do 6 beds.

Planting the Music at dusk. This was the last bed of the day.

So we headed back up to the garden and finished up the Persian star and than did the Purple Glazer and Music. Plus we finalized where the 3 beds of German white and the bed of Shvlisi will go.

All in all very good work.

Frost Warning

Prefrost peppers and eggplant

Got back from the farmers market Saturday afternoon with every intention of relaxing for the rest of the day (farmers markets really take it out of you) but than realized that the weather prophets had issued a frost warning for Sunday morning. That meant we had to do something about what was left of the summer garden. The tomatoes and eggplant are pretty much over except the late tomatoes that in theory are in a hoop house but in fact are not (they have a hoop house frame over them but no plastic on the frame as Eugene did not want to dig in the plastic knowing that he would in all likelihood move the house to another crop such as broccoli or kale) but we had a lot of peppers.

The (probably) last pepper harvest. That's around 400 pounds of bell peppers

I have been picking the peppers green with just a bit of color all summer. I have discovered that peppers, like tomatoes, will ripen up off the plant just fine. And by harvesting them early, the peppers do not get hit badly by bugs or disease. Instead of losing 50% to 80% of the peppers when left on the plant to ripen I now lose under 25%.

So it is now around 3pm. We have eaten lunch, unloaded the van and put away everything from market and most weeks we would be preparing for a nice afternoon nap. But as i mentioned, the weather service was predicting frost Sunday morning. So we had to forgo the nap and go back to work. We started with the peppers. we took out 6 crates and piled them high with mainly green peppers. That took about an hour with both of us working.

Next we were on to the green beans and haricot verts. They needed to be harvested than covered with row cover. We got under 5 pounds of beans from both beds.

Next the spring mix and beets beds needed to be covered. That took very little time as the covers were already there. They just needed to be pulled over the hoops and secured with rocks. But we realized the broccoli also needed a cover. Granted, all these crops can take cold conditions but they do so much better if they have protection. So Eugene found a cover for the broccoli and put it over top of them.

Freshly harvested ginger

While he did that I harvested the ginger. Yes we decided to try to grow ginger in SW Ohio. And it worked decently. But ginger does not like temps below 50F (the poor plants had to deal with a lot of nights in the mid 40's). I figured 33F would kill them so I decided to dig them up and bring them inside. Now we have a lot of ginger plants that need more time in the ground to make more ginger. And we have about 4 ounces of finished ginger. While I like the idea of local ginger I think it makes a lot more sense to buy the imported stuff if you use a lot of ginger. Because ginger requires a 10 to 12 month growing season and needs to temps to be above 50F (I suspect 85F is where is it happiest) it makes no sense to grow this on any kind of commercial scale here in Ohio. I believe the carbon foot print of doing so would far out weight the carbon foot print of importing it since a lot of heat would be required in winter and that heat would have to be more than passive solar. That said it is great house plant. It is beautiful, smells good and if you can keep the plant alive (which is pretty easy) for more than a year you can harvest your own ginger and divide the rest of the roots to make more ginger plants.

So at dusk we had the garden ready for frost. We were exhausted and went in the house to eat and eventually go to sleep-nothing like a 12 hour day of hard physical work to make you feel tip top. The next morning I get up and find that the low temp is no where near freezing, it is 37F.

Now we are ready for cold weather in the market garden. Bring it on Nature, bring it on.

Peanut Harvest

Eugene decided this was the year to plant and grow peanuts so he bought 2 pounds of seed (raw) peanuts and planted 1.5 rows of them in the bottom area back in late May. Yesterday we dug them up along with a lot of big grubs (which will become fish bait) and brought them up to the barn to cure for the next 3 to 6 weeks. It was interesting harvesting the plants. Many were still flowering and developing more pegs that will eventually become peanuts. many plants had scant few peanuts at all and others were loaded. We found that grubs like peanuts, perhaps more than potatoes as we found a lot of grub eaten peanuts along side potatoes that had older grub damage but very little new damage.

Peanuts are easy to harvest. All they need is a spud fork to gently lift them than a gentle shake to get the soil off and they are pretty much ready to by cured.

Big pile o' peanuts

A close up of the pegs (peanuts)

The peanuts are not big like they would be if they were grown further south but if we can get them to cure without molding they should be really good boiled or roasted.

Right now they are sitting in a big pile on an old screen door in the barn. The plan is to gather them up into groups of 3 to 5 , tie the plants together and hang them up somewhere in the barn to continue curing. Kind of like what we do with garlic. It would be easier to lay them out on other screens but at the moment we have onions finishing up their curing (most are done) and lots of potatoes curing where we have removed and cleaned up the onions. So those screen are occupied for the next 3 to 6 weeks.

Farm Share Blog

I just posted 3 (three) new entries to the Farm Share Blog I have over at Local Harvest. These newsletters (I have the whole season to date) should give you a good idea of what goes on with our Farm Share Initiative-what kind and how much food, farm events, etc.. Check it out.

Summer Summary

Fall is here which means the summer of 2009 is officially history. It was a really good summer growing and marketing season for us. the weather was cool and for the most part dry. but when we did get rain it was generally a lot and at just the right time. Still we are down over 4" on rain for the year but perhaps this fall will be wetter than normal and we will make it up.

We grew the best melons ever (and Eugene is an excellent melon grower). Maybe 2% of them were not absolutely excellent. we had several customers (and these are people who's opinions about such things I respect) tell us that our water melons were the best they have ever eaten.

The alliums out did themselves again this year, meaning they are better this year than last and last year they were incredible. Sublime garlic, gigantic leeks (and so far, all we have harvested are the small fall leeks, the winter leeks which should be 2x to 3x larger won't be ready for another month or so), beautiful onions and wonderful scallions.

The tomatoes, despite the plants succumbing to some sort of local blight (not late blight but rather something we contend with every year) fairly early, still produced a lot of huge fruits. Or at least most of them did. We did have some failures such as Black Krim which gave us few very cat faced fruits. I believe we got about 4 usable maters from 15 plants. I do not believe we will grow these again. The Paul Robeson did not do well for us but when the plants did produce typical fruit it produced some gorgeous tomatoes. I saved seed early on and this will get a second chance. The Green Zebra was something else-I believe a small red saladette type mater, something we have far too many of already. Baker Creek messed up on that and as this was about the 7th time they have messed up with us, we will not be ordering from them in 2010. I do like their philosophy but they will have to do far better with selling us correct seed, good seed and getting orders to us in a timely fashion. There are several other seed houses that do heirlooms that give us better service such as Seed Savers Exchange.

Ah enough ranting, back to maters. The great White tomato, while a bad seller, was a great producer of beautiful ivory white fruits with a good acid bite. they came on early and produced longer than just about anything else except early girls which, while early and prolific were a bit of a disappointment this year. The early girls were not as big as last year and found the flavor lacking. fortunately we had GL-18 (AKA Glick's Pride) as our mainstay red mater and they far exceeded our expectations. they were far bigger than they have been before. The shape was about perfect and they rarely cracked and had zero cat facing. It would have been nice if they could have held on a week or two longer but they got us through most of September and we had big red maters when no one else did at the farmers market, cha-ching!. The other reds we grew-the canners did really well for us but I don't think as well as last year (or was it two years ago?). We grew Amish paste and Opalka again. The Amish paste out produced the Opalka about 4:1. We grew enough of these to make and can ourselves plenty of tomato sauce, ratatouille and salsa plus we sold about 300 pounds to others so they could put up tomatoes.

The cherry tomatoes were only so so (which is actually a good thing since when they do really well that means someone has to spend several hours daily picking them and than we have to figure out what to do with the excess). We have decided never to grow green grape again since it does not sell. This means it will produce hundreds of volunteers all over the farm in the future. It is hard to get people to try the green maters. Though it seems when I can get someone to try a green grape they get hooked quickly. they are a very nice mater but for most it is hard to get past the color. The yellow pear barely produced and a lot of them were green again this year. I think it is time to get new seed. the Sun sugar did well for about 3 weeks than quit producing much and the plants now look like hell. This is good as everyone at the farmers market(s) grew this kind this year so the market was flooded and sales were way down. I think next year we will cut back a lot on the cherry tomatoes. We do not need all that many for the farm share-maybe 20 to 30 plants and it seems they have become passe at market. that will free up beds for something else next year.

Unlike last year, we have a lot of ripe peppers. Last year the peppers were very late and we got a killing frost before they got ripe. It did not help that on Sept 14th 2008 we had hurricane force winds for about 6 hours that knocked down all the pepper plants. This year things are completely different. We have a lot of huge bell peppers and they are getting ripe well before it gets cold. I have also learned to take them off the plants when they show color and they ripen up just fine indoors away from pests and diseases that tend to ruin about 50% of the ripe peppers (which is why red, yellow and orange (ripe) peppers cost twice as much as green peppers).

the raspberries out did themselves again this season. The Lathams, our early summer raspberry, was spectacular again. Heavy production and excellent quality. My only complaint was we did a piss poor job of pruning in the early spring which made parts of the raspberry patch almost impossible to harvest. Next year I am cutting back a lot more than Eugene will deem necessary (he has a problem with thinning out plants and wants to leave a lot more than should be left). The Heritage raspberries, which we mow down in early spring, had quite good production and the flavor has been sublime, far better than the Lathams (which, as I said were excellent). Eugene has this crazy notion that we should let the heritage grow and produce in spring. I have this crazy idea that he can do all the harvesting as well as tilling, seeding, transplanting and other spring chores if this happens. You see we do not need a second kind of spring raspberry when the Lathams are pumping out over 30 gallons of fruit. As it is we do not sell all the Lathams produce (we come close but in order to get rid of them we have to sell in bulk and drop the price 33%). We do sell pretty much 100% of the Late summer berries and if we allow the Heritage to have 2 crops we will lessen the fall yield by about 60% and not have enough for the FSI, store and farmers market in August and September. In other words, Eugene's idea of more spring/summer berries is a bad one on many levels.

The strawberries have not been the best. I don't think we have them in the best place and they need to be replaced this fall with new day neutral berries. the yields have been down and disease problems up. We did get a very nice crop of April may berries because we put a hoop house over them. Granted, the hoop house got nailed twice in the winter-once by heavy wet snow and than a month later by high winds. But neither incident seemed to have any effect on the berry production. it is ironic that the first year the berries have been less than great we do a farm tour and in November a workshop on sustainable berry production. I will say the farm tour attendees did not seem to care what kind of shape the berries were in. Next season we should have a new crop of berries in a new and better spot and hopefully we will be swimming strawberries all spring summer and fall next year.

The greens have been around all season. In spring we had lots of lettuce, spring mix, arugula, kale and various Asian greens. Summer we lost the lettuce-we did try to grow some several times because it was cool most of the summer but every time we started lettuce we would get 5 to 8 days of heat and humidity, always a week or two after germination and that would cause the baby lettuce to get bitter and bolt to seed. now that it is autumn we have several beds of nice lettuce growing as well as volunteers coming up around the market garden. the same thing happened with spring mix. After late June it got impossible to grow it though we did try. We did get several harvests of arugula for our efforts through the summer but nothing else from the spring mix beds. Kale and chard were the summer mainstay greens, they always are.

Broccoli did badly for us but we did get some decent cabbages. I dunno why we have such problems with broccoli, perhaps we should quit growing it. Spring radishes were hit and miss and the early red meat radishes were a complete failure. But we do have a 1/2 bed of them now that are very nice. We got really nice early rutabagas as well as red turnips. the fall red turnips are ready to harvest and store for winter, though it will be early next week before that will happen.

Finally, the Farm Share Initiative has been a great thing for us. It allowed us drop a farmers market and make more money while being allowed to stay home and get more work done. Definitely a win, win for us and the fact very few people seemed to notice there is no longer a Tuesday evening market in Oxford (maybe 10 people have asked about this this summer) tells me that we would have made less money this year than last at that market. So it is good that we are doing the FSI.

I think I will change a few things on how the FSI is run next season. This season I allowed members to sign up for the entire season but pay monthly. That will stop as it is not fair to the members that ponied up the cash for the entire season upfront. And the members who did this have all dropped out for the last month, not good. They also got a few extra weeks as I was treating them like the paid in full members as I expected them to go through the entire season. I think the monthly farm tour/pot luck will go as well since we only were able to hold two this year mostly because of a lack of interest on the part of most of the members. I think a once a year farm tour/pot luck will suffice. I am having a hard time getting it through to the members that farm visits are a very important aspect of the farm share/CSA experience. This is how one connects to their farm and without farm visits one might as well buy their food from the farmers market. I also think it is time to drop the month to month deal. This has the potential of getting very confusing which will lead to mistakes -especially when the FSI grows to more than 30 members. It will be replaced by what I used call "Share Cycles" where I break the season down into 2 or 3 month increments for those who cannot do an entire season for whatever reason.

Well, that's the summery of our summer

Sunflowers

Pictures of the sunflowers we grew this year. the seed is a mix of at least 10 different kinds. We got the seed from the Seed savers Exchange. I am saving the seed of most of the different kinds and will plant them next year and see what we get.

Sunflowers sure do make a farm happy.

Early September

Some farm photos for your enjoyment. These were taken throughout the day Friday Sept 4th

Tomato plants

Some of the winter squash harvest. Cushaws, delicata, butternut, acorn and sunshine.

Ugly radishes. sweet and hot.

Rainbow carrots

Sunflower

Sunflower being pollinated by a native bee

More sunflowers

Beetles on a sunflower

Purple peppers