The Fall Harvest
The Farmer’s Market Customer Appreciation Event was a washout with rain on and off all day, but we still have a lot of fun. Marilyn’s Catering always does a fantastic job prepping samples with the fresh produce we give her, coming up with creative recipes for people to try new things. We had drawings for gift certificates for the market all day and the big zucchini weigh-in had five entries ranging from 5.5 lbs to 8.8 lbs. The greatest part was that one of our farm volunteers, Linda, and her family grew that largest zucchini and won the contest! It made our week!!
Back home on the farm, we got another 4 inches of rain that day. With the cooler weather, the fields are not exactly drying out much. Somehow, we managed to get the rye field turned over and disced and ready for fall manure application. Barely even got stuck. Now we will continue to time the weather for planting our winter cover crop of rye.
Many of our fall crops and new seedings have perished, so please bear with us as we are missing a few things from your shares we had planned on for the rest of the season. Even our kale in the field has given up on living with wet feet. We will be filling in the gaps with other creative short season crops as best we can. Our apologies in advance as we may have some weeks with “choose an item” type situations where we have you choose from a variety of veggies to help fill your shares.
On a positive note, we grew our first melons ever. We aren’t exactly sure when they are ripe, but we have been listening carefully as we knock on them with our fists to try and find the hollow sound of ripening. We’re still not sure if they are ripe so perhaps don’t commit your melon to a potluck just yet. Typically melons with too much rain lack in flavor, so we’ll be curious to see how they turn out. The one we sampled was very good. While picking melons, we began to get nervous about the deer eating the winter squash and started harvesting. We picked the three varieties that seemed most ready and have the butternuts left to go. We’ve got lots for shares!
Knocking on melons,
Eric & Rebecca