Hello Folks!
As usual, there is much to report on the farm. We’ve done a few things this week that may not sound exciting but are important to growing veggies. We started off by putting shade cloth on our greenhouse. Shade cloth basically looks like a strong black mesh that we use to cover the outside of the greenhouse. When the summer heat starts bearing down on plants in June, it’s time to do something to cool them off and make the greenhouse a little more efficient. The greenhouse is now covered and we ordered shade cloth for the rest of the high tunnels this week.
We’ve also painted plastic this week! Sounds crazy, but stick with me… Last week we put sweet potato slips into black plastic. Sweet potatoes aren’t started by seed like most other vegetables, they’re started from slips. Slips are shoots that are grown from a mature sweet potato. When we put these slips into black plastic, the black plastic creates heat for the soil, but also additional heat on the plant. With the high temperatures this year, this could quickly burn up the plant. So the solution – turn our black plastic to white.
In crop news…Remember those tomatoes that we tried to burn up last week? Well, it looks like we saved most of them. Unfortunately, peas just don’t take the heat as well as tomatoes, so the shelling peas and sugar snap peas are probably done until fall. The snow peas are hanging on, but not blooming right now. If it cools off a little and they start blooming, they may keep growing for a couple of weeks.
We are starting to pick on some of the zucchini and squash plants this week. There are currently only a couple fruits to harvest out of all the plants, but if the heat backs off a little, the blossoms on the squash will quit dying and we should have a great crop. We started digging potatoes this week. My personal advice is to give them just a little rinse before cooking, but don’t scrub or peel them. The skins on these new potatoes are thin this time of year and delicious! My personal favorite is to combine potatoes, usually halved or quartered, with olive oil, seasoning salt and half a bunch of green onions to cook.
Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, and Crew
What’s in this week’s CSA?
What’s in this week’s bag?
- Kohlrabi
- Cucumbers
- Potatoes
- Green Onions
- Snow Peas (eat me whole) – these are the flat-ish peas
- Sugar Snap Peas* (eat me whole) – these are the rounder, more full-looking peas
- Beets*
- Yellow Squash*
*Full share only