Fall Shares Available

A message from the farm:

We thought you may be interested in the contents of Bugtussle Fall Shares. We consider this share the most nutritious of the season for these vegetables have been gathering the sun's energy all season.

In your share, you can expect:

Tomatoes

Peppers

Butternut squash

Acorn squash

Sweet potatoes

Potatoes

Greens such as kale, lettuce, spinach, arugula, turnips

Carrots (most beautiful fall carrots we've ever had)

Beets

Broccoli

Cabbage

Cauliflower

Chinese Cabbage

Boc choi

Garlic

Onions

Scallions

Leeks

Turnips

Rutabaga

Kohlrabi

Daikon Radish

Remember, most of these items store very well and can be kept over winter, making this share also the best value of the season as well.

The season will run from October 10th to November 21st. We will have small ($150) and medium ($250) shares available. Feel free to bring your reservation form (attached) when you pick up your current share or mail it to us directly.

Please let us know if you are interested,

Eric, Cher, Ira and Opal

(270) 457-BUGS

(click on image below for a copy of the form)

2009 Season, Week Fourteen

August 22, 2009

This week's harvest:

Tomatoes &/or tomatillos

Sweet peppers

Hot peppers

Potatoes

Okra

Patty pan squash

Basil

Onions

Garlic

Watermelon

Zucchini, eggplant, or green chilis

Zinnia flowers

This week's farm news:

Our fall garden is coming right along. Early this week we set out a bunch more fall transplants. We set bok choi, Chinese cabbage, beets, lettuce, cilantro, & Tuscan kale. We direct seeded salad turnips & more (!) carrots. Eric mowed, turned under, & then broadcast cover crop seeds on big areas of the garden where summer crops have finished. The potato & corn patches are sown to buckwheat & crimson clover with a little bit of kale & daikon radish seed mixed in. Our butternut squash vines are beginning to die back & reveal a gorgeous crop of squash -- and there's a bunch! Because our fall garden seems fairly established now, we would like to go ahead & announce this year's fall share. It will be seven weeks (Sat. Oct. 10-Sat. Nov. 21) & cost $150 for small shares & $250 for medium shares. We'll have sign-up forms available for anyone who is interested. The fall share will include a wide variety of greens & lettuce, carrots, beets, radishes, turnips, sweet potatoes, potatoes, winter squashes, etc. As well as a continuation of the summer crops up until we get a frost. Just let us know if you're interested!

2009 Season, Week Thirteen

August 15, 2009

This week's harvest:
Watermelons
Tomatoes
Basil
Sweet peppers
Hot peppers
Green chiles &/or eggplant
Garlic
Onions
Patty pan squash
Cucumbers
Yellow beans
Tomatillos
Okra -- free choice

This week's farm news:

This week's big item in the basket is watermelon. It's an old heirloom variety called "Strawberry"...and as you will see, very delicious! We've been saving our own seed for this variety for a number of years. If you get a really good melon, we'd like to ask you to help our seed saving efforts by selecting 10-20 seeds from it for us. Just rinse them a bit & fold them up in a paper towel. Thanks!

Our big project of the week was digging our potato crop out of the ground. We had lots of great help so the task wasn't too overwhelming. This year's yield was not as great as we had hoped, but we did get potatoes! You'll be receiving the season's first potatoes in your baskets in the coming weeks.

We had some rain early in the week so when the garden was too wet for working in, we started a new construction project. We're putting an addition onto our little cabin to better accomodate our growing family! The goal is to increase the size of our kitchen & add another bedroom. We don't anticipate having everything completed by the time the baby arrives, but we're working on it! Later in the week, once the garden soil dried up a bit, the crew was back in the garden cultivating all the young fall crops to keep them happy & growing. Next week we've got a bunch more fall transplants to set out into the garden!

2009 Season, Week Twelve

August 8, 2009

This week's harvest:
"Halona" muskmelons
"Red sails" lettuce
Sweet corn
Tomatoes
Cucumbers
"Patty Pan" summer squash
Sweet red peppers
Hot peppers
Basil
Onions
Garlic
Eggplant
Yellow beans
Tomatillos

This week's farm news:

We had a few more rains this week, but nothing too severe or intense, thank goodness! Just nice gentle rains which were absolutely perfect for germinating carrots! Otherwise the weather this week felt much more like summer -- fairly hot & sunny. The garden is really ripening & bountiful now. It's been a good challenge keeping everything picked. The muskmelons really ripened this week and we've harvested lots of them! They are incredibly delicious so we hope you enjoy this special summertime treat! Looks like next week we'll have a load of watermelons!

We did a bit more fall garden work this week. Eric direct seeded 2 types of daikon radish, arugula, mizuna, & red mustard (which are remarkably all up & growing already). The interns started some beets in soil blocks for later transplanting into the garden. All of the transplants that were set just over a week ago are settled into the garden & looking good. The fall peas are poking their little heads out of the soil. And so it goes... The seasonal shift of crops is happening. Even though there's a lot of summer produce yet to come, we are transitioning the garden back to cool-season crops. It seems amazing that fall is just around the corner!

2009 Season, Week Eleven

August 1, 2009

This week's harvest:
Cucumbers
Sweet corn
"Patty Pan" summer squash
Tomatoes & cherry tomatoes
Yellow beans
Lettuce
Basil
Eggplant
Hot peppers
Onions & garlic
Tomatillos
Muskmelons -- We have to harvest these as they ripen so if you don't get one this week, you will next week

This week's farm news:

Happy August! Well folks, even though our main crop of tomatoes are still craving some good sunshine, lots of other summer crops are finally starting to come in. This week's basket is really starting to have the diversity of summer goodies we've all been waiting for! Yeah!

We've got a great jump on this year's fall garden. We had a big push to get a bunch of transplants set before (yet another!) rain. We set over 1000 various baby plants -- brussels sprouts, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, & kohlrabi. Eric direct-seeded another bed of carrots so now we've got nearly 2000 row feet of them in the ground! That's potentially 24,000 carrots! He also seeded some fall shelling peas. Once it rained & we had to stop garden work, our intern Laura taught the two new interns, Jessie & Jaykub, & our short-term volunteer, Andrea, all about starting seeds in soil blocks. They started lots more fall crops -- bok choi, Chinese cabbage, lettuce, and Tuscan kale. On Wednesday we had the big project for the entire crew of digging potatoes. Even Ira & Opal were in on the action, searching around in the soil for all of those buried starchy treasures! What fun!

2009 Season, Week Ten

July 25, 2009

This week's harvest:

"Gold of Bacau" yellow beans
Cucumbers
Basil
Tomatoes
Onions
Garlic
Hot peppers
"Patty Pan" squash (medium shares)

This week's farm news:

Thanks so much to all of you that made the journey to the farm last Sunday for the potluck. It was a beautiful day but, surprisingly, almost too cool to go for a swim!

The weather as been fairly incredible for July -- unseasonably cool, rainy, & dark! The tomato crop would actually love more sunshine than they've been getting... They're dragging their feet because of this crazy July darkness!

This week we bought 50 12-week old pullets (immature laying hens) from some friends in the nearby "Plain" community. We hope to increase our egg supply for the fall. We have to slowly integrate the new birds into the old flock of hens as chickens can be nasty when it comes to establishing the "pecking order," so we've got them partitioned off in one of the portable coops so they all can get used to seeing each other but have limited physical access!

As you can see, we harvested lots of beans this week. We'll only have them for a few weeks in the summer but they last for months in the freezer. All you have to do is trim the ends & blanch them for 3 minutes, drain, cool, & then pack into freezer bags. Also, this week's recipe [for Dilly Beans] is an easy way to deal with lots of beans!

In the next few days, we'll be hosting 3 new garden volunteers. We're hoping to utilize all the extra helping hands to get lots of fall garden planting done next week.

200th Deliveraversary!

2009 Season, Week 9
July 18, 2009

This week's harvest:

Sweet corn
Basil
Cilantro
Green beans
Yellow squash &/or zucchini
Onions
Garlic
Cucumbers
Tomatoes
Hot peppers

This week's farm news:

What unseasonably cool weather we're experiencing right now! It feels more like September than July! We were blessed with some more timely rains this week, too. On Wednesday we hosted over 40 folks on our farm for our annual "C-R-A-F-T" event (Collaborative Regional Alliance for Farmer Training). The program is intended to give interns a chance to check out other farms in the area and meet other interns. Our topic of discussion was "bringing forth fertility" -- basically how we intensively managed or ruminants & chickens on a piece of ground for several years in order to increase the fertility enough to then turn the ground & raise a garden without any additional compost. Our scheme has worked out well & the result is a very beautiful, productive garden. We finished up the farm tour and then shared a delicious potluck. Literally as folks were driving away the thunder started rolling in and we had an awesome thunderstorm! What timing! Earlier in the week we had a nice rain just after setting out leek transplants and seeding well over 1000 row feet of carrots for the fall. We're feeling pretty lucky here in Bugtussle!