The farm work continues unabated! It seems like the entire summer is a blur of work, punctuated by occasional blips of socializing as we sit behind the stand at the Farmers’ Market. The work has its relaxing moments, though: watering, weeding… those things are quite pleasant and give a good chance to inhale the fresh country air and look at the scenery. I especially like it when Emily can take a break from her desk job and come out to the garden. Yes, I said it- we work to get a break from work. Maybe that’s why we’re so tired? But look how content she is casting water upon her baby plants!
We have a lot of crops that are on a rolling harvest schedule-we take some, leave some to grow more and fill in, and so forth- extending the harvest and making sure we have a continual supply of things like carrots, beets, cucumbers, and green beans for the weekly market. Now that the summer is starting to wind down, though, we are harvesting some of the full-season crops. Luckily, most of those types of things store well. We’ve pulled out a hundred or so pounds of potatoes in the last two weeks (there are still more to get) and we have harvested the garlic. We’re pretty excited about that; we love garlic and use a ton of it, but also it brings a good price and the softneck varieties store well. Here we see the garlic hanging in the shed to finish curing. We’ll be replanting a lot of what you see here, to expand the garlic operation to where we really want it to be next year. This year we only harvested about two hundred heads, but next year we want to harvest a bit over a thousand.
One of the things we’re working on is stabilizing our production so we can deliver a controlled quantity of vegetable on a fixed schedule, so we can start offering CSA shares. This is trickier than it sounds, but we feel like we’re making good headway. Next year, we’re going to offer shares to a handful of select people that we know are patient, not afraid to give useful feedback, and are extremely excited about having our vegetables and are already asking about shares. We are actually doing one share this year already, but we wanted to start slowly, because if you mess up CSA shares, you’ll scare away future customers permanently. Here’s a picture of the box we sent out last week.
I’ll leave you new with a few funny veggie pictures. The first is “love carrots” I pulled up this week while I was harvesting the remainder of the carrots. The second is of a giant Walla Walla onion a friend of ours grew. It’s so huge, it’s not to be believed, so Emily wanted a picture. We are going to put it in salsa this weekend when we start canning.
