Spring CSA Newsletter: May 9th, 2022 (Week 2)

Hello All,

We hope you enjoy this next box.  We are sorry to give you two herbs at a time, but the cilantro said now or never, so we had to tend to the screaming baby that was no longer a baby.  Cilantro has a short harvest period.  It won’t stick around like parsley.  Parsley is a herb anyone can grow!  It’s slow and steady.  Maybe 1 out of 500 will bolt, but it’s not the same for cilantro.  Cilantro has got its time frame in its leaf stage, and if it goes beyond this, it starts to put on flowers that quickly go to seed, a.k.a., coriander!

We are so happy to have made it through last week’s cold spell unscathed!  We bought a torpedo heater to cut the edge of the below freezing temperatures in our 500’ tunnel that is full of our grafted tomatoes that we started back in January.  They are already being trellised, so we couldn’t cover them with row cover!  The low temperature dips of spring are always so stressful!  Like I said about the NICU last week,  even in the hoop houses these low dips into the 20’s can burn and kill plants!  Outside there are black spots randomly in the fields where even dandelions were burned.  We had three nights dip into the mid twenties, with temps as low as 25º  one night and 26º another. Luckily in the hoop house with the torpedo heater it only got to 34º.  Gotta love these tunnels and their heat retention in times like this.  They bring on fruit a month to two ahead of what we can get in the field. That fruit and it’s flavor are worth all the time and effort!  Chris was up in the night like you would be with kids with a fever. Setting an alarm and checking their temperature periodically making sure you didn’t have to take any more drastic measures to keep them in a healthy temperature range!  

Your Farmers,
Chris and Aeros