Hello Folks!
It’s hard to believe it’s already July. On the farm, May feels like we are starting to get ramped up with production, June seems to be in full gear, but July is when we reach our full marathon pace. At this point, there is no pause or break for us until December (we hope). This week, we’ve gone from irrigate, irrigate, irrigate to just a little mud – and we are very happy about it. We caught a gentle rain over a 24 hour period on Saturday that gave us an inch of moisture. That’s almost a perfect rain 🙂
The rain also gave Ryan a couple minutes to pause. Ryan’s daily routine usually begins around 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning and ends around 9:00 or 10:00 pm with paperwork. The crew shows up at either 6:00 am or 7:00 am depending on the forecast for the day. The hotter the weather, the sooner we need to be in the field so that the young crew isn’t in the heat in the middle of the afternoon. We have so many people and so much action on the farm this time of year that instead of a doorknob on the door to the mudroom, we currently have a towel stuffed in the hole where the knob should be because the knob got tired and gave up.
The greenhouse is full! Every little bit of bench space is covered by trays of plants, mostly cabbage, broccoli, and kohlrabi. We have a couple of hayracks of fully grown cabbage plants that are ready to be transplanted. There’s another bunch of watermelon and cantaloupe plants that need to get in the field this week and onto plastic.
We started picking pickling cucumbers this week. They are delicious! There’s not very many yet this week, but in just a couple of weeks we will have enough for to start pickling. We also started picking sweetcorn just yesterday. The first batch was picked late morning, we ate several ears raw, and then cooked up some more for lunch.
If you are looking for ideas on how to use your produce this week, be sure to check out the blog at CookItQuick.org. Alice Henneman is a food and nutrition Extension Educator with the University of Nebraska who is also using our weekly CSA. Each week she uses the produce from the box and shares a series of photos and recipes on cookitquick.org. If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check it out.
Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, and Crew