2010 Season, Week Five

June 12, 2010 newsletter

This week's harvest:
Carrots
Lettuce ("Buttercrunch" for medium shares & "Sweet Valentine" for small shares)
Swiss Chard
Beets & Greens
"Yellow Crookneck" Squash
Very Fresh Garlic
Basil
Flowering Onions

This week's farm news:

The temperatures were hot again this week but, unlike last week, we had some very lovely & timely rain showers. The crew planted our butternut squash patch this week. Every year we select & store several baskets of squash from last fall's harvest to save for seed. Then when it's time to plant, we cut open the squash, harvest the seeds, & go straight to the garden to plant them. We get excellent germination this way because the squash keep the seeds in the perfect storage environment. That also means our seed stock is coming from squash that actually stored for the entire winter, therefore (hopefully!) improving the overall keeping quality of the squash from year to year. We also planted our sweet potato patch this week & with Eric & four interns working together it was a pretty quick job. The sweet potato slips got watered-in by a fabulous rolling thunderstorm. We rejoice when our timing works out like that!

The crew also yanked out the spent pea vines & spinach to make room for our late planting of tomatoes & they began the garlic harvest - you're getting some of this juicy uncured goodness in your baskets this week! Enjoy it while it's so fresh!

During rainy spells throughout the week, both Beth & Ben worked on Beth's room in the barn & got the majority of it completed! Now Beth can finally get settled in!