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Corn and Melons made their premiere this week! We grew successfully organic corn without pesticides in Western NY! (Can you tell I am excited?) Incredible. Also distributed were eggplants, green peppers, hot peppers, zucchini, onions, leeks, beets, chard, and lettuce and/or mixed greens. Cilantro, basil and oregano still are available.
I guessed it would be another week of harvesting eggplants, cucumbers, green peppers, and hot peppers. I really don't mind -- it's a fun job to find the most ripe vegetable (or fruit?); it's also really amazing to me to see a little plant make so much produce. I was ready to go to the fields but my first job was to spread peanut butter on the electrified plastic wire strip around the farm. Some deer tracks were found in the fields and the fence needed to be baited again. I am told that deer can jump 8 ft over a fence. This "fence" is a white plastic band about 1/2 inch width over a metal wire about 4ft high. Animals can certainly crawl under it or jump over it, but the electricity that runs through the wire is the deterrent. Here is the plan: the deer smell the tasty peanut butter on the plastic strip, give a lick and Zzzzt! they experience the not-so-tasty goodness of 9,000 volts. So, of course, they don't come back and hopefully spread the word to other deer to stay away. As I was doing this for the full perimeter (1500 to 2000 feet), I was thinking of marketing names or slogans for this product : Lick-A-Bolt, Zap-Away. I was also wondering if deer like peanut butter or some other spread like Nutella, or perhaps marshmallow Fluff?
This week we also harvested some watermelons and cantelopes; this is more difficult to time because of the discernment needed to find out about the sweetness inside. What is the sound of the thump? What is the color and texture of the rind? How easy does the melon fall away from the stem? ....
Mostly similar to last week, with the exception of no fennel: Eggplants, green peppers, 1-2 hot peppers, zucchini, onions, carrots, scallions (or are they leeks?), chard, and mixed greens. There were also a few tomatillos available. The sunflowers are still glorious...
(Two weeks behind...)
It was a real hot day again, and again we harvested eggplants, cucumbers, green peppers, and hot peppers (jalopeno, hungarian hot wax, and black Czech). The eggplants (black, Italian-style) were huge and seem never-ending. Green peppers are still abundant as well as the other various hot peppers. I thought it would be a full harvest day but after an hour, Erin decided that she wanted to till in the rotten tomatoes so I was introduced to the tractor (oooh!). It was Farming Machinery class 101-01 for me -- and I felt like a child around a fire engine. It's a beautiful new, shiny orange-red Kubota tractor. It was fun just to watch how to connect & disconnect the attachments. I wasn't allowed to drive it. I helped Erin by loading the steel pipe (5ft) tomato supports into the front bull dozer - type shovel so she could till in the soil.
PS The picture below is taken from Erin's blog (entry of August 11 2009): look how beautiful the eggplants are!
This week’s share was very abundant and beyond expectations. Eggplants, green peppers, a hot wax pepper, a black Czech pepper, a jalopeno pepper, zucchini, onions, fennel, carrots, scallions, and mixed greens.
There were also free sunflowers (4 ft long stems with “dinner plate” size blooms), and the free “u-pick” herb fields offered cilantro, basil, bronze fennel and dill. There were also some beautiful “u-pick” flowers available.
The place is amazing and I am blessed to be part of it.
It was a full shift of harvesting this past week: eggplants, cucumbers, green peppers, hot peppers, and some fennel. The eggplants were huge and very prolific. I had weeded these eggplant plants weeks ago and it was worth it. Harvesting cucumbers are a bit of a chore since they like to hide, and similar to beans, if the fruit is allowed to grow too big, the plant will shut down its production. We harvested the three varieties in the row (over 200 cucumbers) and more were on the way.
The green peppers were ready and sometimes they grow really close together. A few were turning reddish. The other peppers (Hungarian hot wax, Czech black, and Jalopeno) were all healthy and full grown.
We took a few minutes to walk in the mini-corn field; it was amazing to see the width of the stalks and the corn coming out. We should start to harvest soon.
PS The onions have completely taken over the greenhouse. They have been placed horizontally on every flat surface for curing. Their withered stalks are sneaking out of the burlap sack covering. We will have an "cured" or yellow onion (or two) in our shares for a long time.
This weekly list of food is not as precise as I would like it to be, but I still hope you get a general idea. I'll repeat that the weekly list is about 9 to 11 vegetables, maybe even more, and I am so astounded by the quality that it really doesn't matter...Hmmm, i think it was: potatoes, fennel, an onion, carrots, squash (4 to 5), beets, mixed greens, lettuce, an eggplant, peppers (green, hot), and herbs. I also think a few tomatillos were available.
It was a real hot day, but I didn't mind much since potato harvesting was our first job. It is really fun to dig down in the dirt and find these hidden golden or red beauties. I really feel like a kid playing in the dirt with a real purpose of finding stuff. We also found some scabby type growth on a few, and that was a bit disappointing as well as confusing. I have a lot to read and study over the winter. We harvested about 2lbs per share, which is about 60+lbs. Part of the harvest duty is washing the vegetables. Erin uses a bathtub built up on a wooden frame to wash off the dirt to have the food more presentable. After we washed the potatoes, we harvested fennel -- I really need to keep pictures up here soon -- fennel looks like a flattened cream colored pineapple, with what looks like woven strips on its side. Add another vegetable to my list of foodplants that I would have no idea what it is in its natural form, or how it grows. Finally we ended the day pulling up more onions for curing.
