Farm News – September 25, 2014

Hi Folks, Still no rain here on the farm, and none in the forecast for at least another week! It looks like we’ll be spending a lot of time moving the sprinklers around. It’s fortunate that we have a lot of crops planted on plastic mulched beds with drip irrigation. With drip irrigation we can keep a lot more crops growing with less water.  Lettuce is a good example — crops for early fall are planted on white plastic to keep the soil cool and later plantings are put on black plastic to maintain soil warmth as we head into late fall. We are back into lettuce production this week and will have it in the shares now for the rest of the season.

There are still not as many other greens as I would like to see. I hope this will change as we get farther into the fall. We are waiting on a final planting of summer squash to begin to yield. I expect by next week we should have enough for some groups, and will begin a rotation so that everyone will receive one more round. We have a tremendous crop of butternut squash so these will be in your share this week. We also have a beet crop coming on, but they are a bit small and a bit crowded in the rows. We need to thin them so they can continue to enlarge. We also have a lot of nice salad turnips as well as a red skinned turnip. Some groups will receive turnips and others baby beets and then next week the distribution will be reversed.

The share for this week will be: Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, red onions, lettuce, turnips or beets, spinach, kale, butternut squash and choice of an herb (cilantro or dill mostly).

Enjoy! Farmer John