Farm News – August 15, 2016

Hi Folks!  It is my firm belief (or perhaps my desperate hope) that we are over the worse of the heat wave.  It’s been a tough couple of weeks!  I thought that it was forecast to break on Tuesday with some rain followed by more tolerable temperatures but now it seems the temps will climb toward the upper eighties later in the week with no real relief in sight until early next week.  The good news is that we received nearly 3 “of rain during the week a huge benefit to the fall crops that we have been seeding and transplanting.

The only drawback is that the fields have been too wet to work, and especially, to direct seed, so we are a bit setback with our planting.  The spinach I planted 2 weeks ago has come up nicely, so we have that to look forward to in about a month.  The bad news is that the heat has badly damaged much of our watermelon crop, especially the dark green “sugar baby” variety which soak up the sun and essentially get cooked.  We have been attempting to send watermelons to all of the members over the past few weeks but at this point it is uncertain we will have enough to go around.  We have one final planting which will be ready in about 3 weeks, so we will see…  If you do not receive a watermelon, we will try to make it up with something else special.

We have a colorful share for you this week with red onions, carrots, and purple fingerling potatoes.  And the rattlesnake beans have begun; these are an heirloom variety and are green with purple streaks.   The peppers are still green but are starting to ripen so you should be seeing red, yellow and orange ones soon.  Lettuce is back and summer squash is on hiatus for now.

The share for this week will be:  Beans, peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, carrots, choice of chard or kale, savoy cabbage, blue fingerlings, lettuce, red onions and choice of an herb (parsley, chives, or Thai basil); possibly a melon or watermelon.  For extras we have tomatillos, hot peppers and okra.

Enjoy!  Farmer John