CSA Summer Newsletter: June 27th, 2022 (Week 5/23)

Howdy Folks,

Well when summer hits there is no more sway in our step until the end of the day!  We harvest every day of the week!  All mornings start with the harvest of tender leafy greens, be they salad,  dark leafy greens, or herbs.  It’s best to harvest them when the sun is low, this keeps them full of moisture and they have a longer shelf life when harvested at this time of day.  

After morning harvest we cultivate, irrigate and sometimes transplant, or harvest more.  Cultivation, we either do hand cultivation, just pulling weeds by hand or tractor mounted implement cultivation.  Most transplanting is done with a water wheel transplanter.  This allows the transplants to get watered in.  Towed behind the tractor on the three point hitch we have a water wheel transplanter that has a water tank mounted above shelves to store flats being transplanted out to the field.  Below these shelves is a axle that can house anywhere from one to three wheels that have dibbler spikes poking out of them.  These dibblers make the holes that we drop the seedlings from the flats into.  The dibbler releases water into these holes as it makes them.  This creates an ideal environment for a seedling being put into a wet hole.  It eases planting stress, and also one less thing that the farmer has to do in a hurry (water in the plants).  Although sometimes we do irrigate within hours of planting from drip tape that was previously put into the bed when the beds were being shaped or covered with plastic row cover.  In the afternoons fruits are harvested!  Like cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, eggplant, strawberries, watermelon, blueberries, peppers, etc.  Things always need fixing, so throw the fix in there as well, and don’t forget about watering the greenhouse. We have our last successions of peppers and tomatoes still in the nursery stage in the greenhouse, as well as successions of salad greens and cooking greens for the summer and fall, as well as fall storage crops for the late fall into winter.

We apologize that we forgot the SWAP box this week.  So your first SWAP box experience will be next week.  This SWAP box is for trading or gifting, if you don’t like something you can put it into this box, and hopefully in the box waiting for you is something that you could use instead and like a little more.  This is meant to be a give and take box, so please don’t just take something out of it.  If you put something in you can take something out.  So the idea is SWAP OR TRADE OR GIFT!

Have a beautiful week!

Your Farmers, 

Chris and Aeros