Hey Folks!
It’s hard to believe that it’s that time again… time when the days begin to get shorter, the nights may cool off, and the kiddos go back to school. This week marks the start of a new school year for our children who are entering pre-school, Kindergarten, and 2nd grades as well as most of our crew. We are glad to say that some of our crew will be starting their first year in college, some will be going back to high school, and at least a couple will be sticking with us. That means that while we tearfully say goodbye to most of our crew, we will be welcoming new members as well. This farm would never work if we didn’t have great people working with us and we fully expect growing pains as new crew members learn the ropes.
We are excited to tell you that we officially had our largest single-day produce harvest on Monday this week. We picked cantaloupe, pickles, squash, zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes and more than 4,000 pounds of potatoes! All of this is hand-picking, labor-intensive harvesting of produce.
Make sure you check out the blog pictures this week – we have a great machine from the 1930’s with steel wheels that we have modified, as it was originally pulled behind a horse, but we now pull it behind the tractor. The machine digs up the potatoes, rolls them over a steel chain and dumps them back out on the ground. We follow this machine by crawling on our hands and knees, picking up each potato, inspecting it for quality, and putting it in a 5 gallon bucket. We then load *heavy* buckets onto a trailer, drive them back to the shed and do a combination of hand washing and machine washing of potatoes before sorting and weighing them. All-in-all, it’s a rewarding, but exhausting process.
It’s also exciting to tell you that we will begin harvesting water melons at the end of the week! We’ve ravenously eaten the first couple early melons at our house -to make sure they are top quality, of course 🙂 We are harvesting cantaloupe like gang busters, but the plants themselves are not looking great. It seems the plants may die earlier than normal this year, so it may be pertinent to eat your melons now. Hard squash and pumpkins are looking excellent for winter. There are some fruits on the vine and these plants look better than any other hard squash crop we’ve had.
Thank you for your continued support of the CSA. We hope you are all enjoying the produce.
Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, and Crew