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We received green kale (phew!), carrots, another big white onion, zucchini, napa cabbage, 3/4 lb green and purple beans, 3 lbs of potatoes, beets, 4 zucchini/squash, and 3 heads of lettuce. There was also pick your own basil and cilantro.
On Monday, my wife, Del prepared a meal with the vegetables and some eggs from local farmer. She stated proudly that this meal was fully made by food from local farmers that we know on a "first name" basis. This is probably not the first time it has happened, but just knowing it makes the decision to live linked to the local community easier.
PS I do not care how healthy or tasty "dinosaur" kale is; I still think it's weird looking.
The first job this past week was to prepare the onions for curing. About 1/3 - 1/2 crop of onions (red, white and yellow) were harvested. Now one hundred onions (maybe two hundred) needed to be placed on top of each other on the greenhouse tables, similar to laying roofing tiles. These tables are about 5ft by 20ft, and three of these tables, previously used for seedlings, will have onions "curing" for a few months.
The next assignment was harvesting kale. Oh, I didn't harvest kale last week; I harvested swiss chard. I am sorry for getting all these vegetables and greens mixed up; it's just that I have never been surrounded by so many different varieties of unlabeled living plants. There were 3 kinds of kale to be harvested: green, purple and dinosaur. The "dinosaur" kale is more bumpy like lizard skin and its stalk is white ribbed like lettuce. It looks weird.
Next we harvested carrots. This was fun. Like potatoes, carrots are dug up after the soil has been loosened by a pitchfork. We found carrots formed in strange shapes (for example, chicken feet). It's funny to think that just because a store never sold these strangely shaped carrots, could they not exist? Does the plant know that it must grow according to the way we expect to grow? A re-evaluation process is happening: must the healthiest and tastiest vegetables must be in the shape and have the color that I have been accustomed or "sold on"...?
We also harvested fennel and beans. I learned that long beans must be harvested, or the plant will stop making beans.
Besides a bunch of kale, a big 'ol onion, about 1 3/4 lbs of potatoes, green and "purple" string beans, we received heads of napa cabbage, green leaf lettuce, and red leaf lettuce. We also received yellow summer squash, zucchini and beets. There were some herbs - maybe parsley or cilantro, too. I think the peppers are coming soon.
Sorry for the delay -- but I'm thinking there's only two people that actually read this on a weekly basis, so it's a easy forgiveness to get... It was a good work shift but a busy week to get the notes written down here.
I definitely like working Sundays rather than Saturdays. A Saturday shift is mostly weeding but since Sunday is a pickup day, Sunday's shift is HARVESTING. First, I harvested kale. Erin hands out a special harvest knife, small like a pen knife, but is it sharp! Usually I come home with knife prick or two because of a jab. So I learned to harvest kale by cutting the branches at the plant's base and then inspecting the leaves for color and holes. Next we pulled up some onions. She has about 3 rows of big white onions, and we were choosing the ones that were close to the size of a softball. They were all big and really beautiful. The allocation would be 1 per share, and she probably has enough to last through September. The next vegetable we would harvest was potatoes. Now because of the late blight, the potatoes were to be harvested earlier than normally to avoid losing the whole crop. [Concerning the blighted tomatoes, Erin was spraying another natural fungicide spray (potassium bicarbonate) to slow down the decay process and save some of the fruit.] Harvesting the potatoes was fun. The plant was pulled directly out of the ground and some potatoes (golden with delicate skin) would fall down to the soil. There would also be a few appearing in the soil by the unearthing of the plant. Then she used a pitchfork to turn over more of the soil to find more. There I was on my hands and knees in this potato alley, searching for these buried treasure. I found a "rotten" brown one and I asked her about it. "Disease, or moles, or water damage..?" "Er, no," she said. "That was the starter potato that created all the other smaller potatoes". I smiled sheepishly. Sometimes I think I have a potato for a brain.
I was so affected by the loss of the tomatoes that I didn’t even look at the vegetables in the bags. My wife put them away. I’ll try to remember what was on the distribution list: red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, other greens, cabbage, squash, beets. I know there was more, but I still bummed about the blight.
It was a sad day at Mud Creek Farm this past Sunday. Erin is usually very easygoing and optimistic, but when the work-crew arrived, she looked concerned. She discovered late blight on the tomatoes and we needed to “contain” it. We would spray the smaller plants first with a bacteria spray (organically accepted) and then remove the plants to avoid the spread to other tomatoes and potatoes. Initially, when she told us about the blight I envisioned more spraying than removal.
So I had this spray device (35lb + when full) strapped to my back and then I sprayed each plant (over and under and stem). It was sort of cool, and a partner and I teamed up to spray about 5 rows that morning. All of the potatoes would had to be sprayed since this blight has its origins tracing back to the Great Potato Famine in Ireland.
Then we needed to remove the plants. The reality started to sink in. We would be removing all the tomato plants close to the ones that were affected. We ended up removing two 15 ft rows of plants and one complete row (about 180 ft). My heart was breaking. Each of these plants had at least 12 green tomatoes that were growing beautifully.
Erin gave the instructions clearly. We had to watch where we were stepping, block the downwind to avoid spores flying around, and carefully encase the plant into the plastic bag. Then we took the bags away by loading the bags in a parked car for disposal in the trash; composting was not an option. I am glad that my shift was over midway through the removal. I really do not if I could have handled the scene of a removal of a full row of tomatoes.
Removing weeds and their roots from the ground is a great accomplishment and displays our diligence, hard work and control over nature; blight spores are so damn small and powerfully contaminating, causing such damage and havoc and fear. There is something deep and spiritual about the presence of evil in a good environment. I am too upset to try to figure it out though.
I am an accountant by trade and experience. Even so, I can't keep proper track of the quantities and varieties of vegetables we are receiving. This week was more red leaf lettuce, mixed green, sugar snap peas, spinach, summer squash, zucchini, turnips, another kohlrabi, and another head of cabbage. [I am beginning to wonder as the kohlrabi pile up on our kitchen counter how far I could hit one with a baseball bat.]
It’s amazing how others react when I tell people I am working on a farm for a share of the food grown. More often than not, I am asked about how I found about it and how they could participate. I am really fortunate to have found this farm for the experience and for the food! I get a sense that more and more people would eat healthy if they knew how to. I hope that mega foodstuff conglomerates become worried that small farm communities are the new (and only) future of America's food development.
My church, Artisan Church of Rochester, has been singing the hymn Everlasting Arms (Showalter/Hoffman) for the past few weeks. With small word changes, I came up with: What a humid day, wipe the sweat awayWeeding away at Mud Creek farms... (I’m weeding)Weeding ...(I’m weeding), weeding... (I’m weeding), weeding away at Mud Creek farms... Weeding ...(I’m weeding), weeding... (I’m weeding), weeding away at Mud Creek farms... Yes, it was another week of weeding of a vegetable whose name I am struggling to remember. Oh, I remember the hot sun, the snails and beetles, and the sly weeds that grew up so close to the plant that my unaccustomed eye can't distinguish, but not the name. Oh! It was Chinese Eggplants! What was most discouraging was doing 20 feet and looking up to barely see the end of the row 180 ft away. But we did it, on our hands and knees, and it was quite an accomplishment. Erin is a master weed identifier. Once I called her over to ask, "Is this a vegetable? Does it stay?"
She walked over and asked me, "Is it in the row?"
"No, but it looks official, you know like a real vegetable." "It doesn't matter, pull it up. Anyway, it's a 'xxxxxx' weed." I thought, Okay now I understand, 'if it's not in a row, then it has to go.' Sometimes I feel like a 8 year old with these silly questions. We also mulched the potatoes with straw. Hilling potatoes is to done with dirt but it was late in the season so Erin is using straw upon the advice of another potato farmer. The hope is that the potatoes will send out the the buds into the straw and the potatoes will grow in the straw.
