Farm News-November 15, 2012

Hello Everyone,

I hope that by now those of you who have lost power have had your service restored. It has been a difficult couple of weeks, but hopefully soon things will be back to normal. As of this writing we are still waiting to be reconnected. Most of our road had their electricity restored on Saturday, but a tree took down the line from the pole to the house at our place and the power company did not run the new line when they were in the neighborhood yesterday. They have promised that we will have power back by midnight on Sunday. I hope that this is the truth! We have been getting by with a generator, which has kept the heat and water running, enabled us to use the lights and the computer and even take an occasional hot shower. We have been cooking on a camp stove with gas canisters that I have been saving for more than 10 years in case of an emergency. The generator does not have enough capacity (wattage) to run the walk-in cooler where we store our crops and because of this we have had some losses. You may have noticed that the lettuces were somewhat small last week; this was due to our inability to keep them cold and having to remove many of the outer leaves which had gone bad.

We were also prevented from harvesting certain crops ahead of several extremely cold nights we experienced this past week. For two consecutive nights, temperatures dipped into the low 20’s, causing extensive damage to the crops that are still in the field. It is unusual to have such extreme lows so early in November and I take it as more evidence of the “weirding” of our climate. While nothing was actually killed by the cold, much of the leaf was burned and this slows down the growth and development of the plants. We still have large numbers of broccoli and cauliflower that we are waiting on to head up. It is uncertain whether they still will mature but if they do, it is likely that they will produce very small heads. Even lettuce which is normally quite resistant to the cold was badly burnt. We will have to rely largely on root vegetables and the crops we have in storage for the final shares of the year. It is not the way I wanted to end the season, but this is the situation we are in.

The share for this week will be:
Potatoes, parsnips, carrots, delicata or sweet dumpling squash, tatsoi or other mustard greens, sweet potatoes, daikon or radishes, and Swiss chard.

Enjoy!
Farmer John