CSA Week Nine

News from the field:

Everything in farming is time delayed. The affects of bad weather in spring don’t show up until mid-summer. In our case, the effects from 6-8 weeks of solid rain are finally starting to show up. And I won’t sugar coat it – the effects are bad. We have onions rotting in the field -- and we usually grow and sell literally tons of onions. It is going to really hurt to have few or no onions this fall, particularly for the fall CSA. We have lost about 80% of plantings of lettuce, mesclun and arugula. They are rotting in the field and we will have to till them in.

Besides actual crop losses, we haven’t been able to mechanically weed, so the weed pressure has reduced yields on everything we grow and we aren’t harvesting as much as we planned for. Also, the amount of weed seeds in the soil will be a lot more next year. And we haven’t been able to set up our fields for fall cover crops that will help them through the winter. In short, things are a mess.

We may need your patience and understanding over the next few weeks if your baskets are short on greens, long on greenhouse tomatoes (where we can control the water), and perhaps a little short on diversity. But we do believe that things will even out and that dry weather will return some day.

In the Basket:

Zephyr summer squash – Check out Sarah and Anna’s breading recipe on the back!!

Cucumbers, tomatoes, and cherry tomatoes – I love August!

Garlic – This garlic is cured, so keep it in a cool, dry cupboard – not the fridge.

Lettuce/mesclun/bagged spinach – We don’t have enough of any of these to give the same to everyone, but everyone in the CSA will get some salad fixins.