Local Certified Organic Produce
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Archives of the Weekly JournalThe 2004 Growing SeasonNotes for the week of 4-4-04.
Seeded 21 more flats of
various veggies - broccoli, cabbage, zucchini, romaine and
loose leaf lettuces. Hoop house is full and flats are
spilling out. Lost some tomato plants Sunday night. Too
cold for them that night.
Raw milk cheeses have been
brought back. We are selling them now in the refrigerator
where the eggs are kept. Garlic and Herb a new favorite
of mine.
Jenny has been busy planting
flowers and herbs. Weeding the boxes in field 1 as well.
Jim has created a new
implement to pull behind his Massey. Says "It will be
great in just the right conditions". I remember my dad
coming up with new ideas to improve some piece of
equipment to make a job easier or more efficient. That's
winter work for farmers.
We will be in the fields this
week planting onions, broccoli, beets, carrots, chard and
some lettuces.
Reading a good book (slowly,
reading always makes me so sleepy. Probably because I'm
in bed and it's 11pm.) It's called Slow Food. Edited by
Carlo Petrini. Collected thoughts on taste, tradition and
the honest pleasures of food.
Winter of 2003Happy wet winter to all ! We hope all of you have managed to stay off the ice and beat the short winter day blues. Spring really is just around the corner and reading this letter is the proof. This winter has been amazingly wet but that’s OK as long as the spring weather lets us into the fields at planting time. Broccoli, cabbage, tomatoes, peppers and a few others will be started by the 14th of February in a hoop house so they will be good and ready to grow when the time is right to get them in the ground. A friend, last summer, let us sample an heirloom tomato they grew in their backyard. It was delicious! More substance and less runny juice. Thanks to our friends you can look forward to trying another heirloom tomato called Rose along side with Purden’s Purple and our usual red varieties. We’ve been assured, this being the year of the Cicada invasion, nothing will suffer out in the fields. Cicadas are attracted to tall woody plants. I’ve heard their job is to prune trees and fertilize the ground. Damage can be done to young trees if the Cicidas chew to much. You may want to cover them with a cheese cloth or fabric row cover to protect them from damage and to much stress. Nothing will change in the routine of the pick up days. Still 3 to 7pm on Monday or Thursday, starting the week of May 24. That will give us 23 weeks of farm, fresh, organic produce. We are scheduling two nature walks through the farm this summer. Each on a Sunday. June 27 and July 25. Mark Schneider, manager of The Feed Barn, will be heading the walks. He holds a degree from Ohio State in Natural Resources. Taught at Great Oaks for 16 years classes in Natural Resources and biology and has managed for The Feed Barn for over 10 year. He’s a know-it-all when it come to pointing out some of the natural features of the farm, the plant identities and brat tracks (animal tracks) running throughout the farm. Plan to spend at least an hour on the walk and ask lots of question of Mark. Bring a picnic lunch and blanket to rest and refresh after your walk. Throughout the season, when we have more than usual to plant and harvest we would like to invite your help. We will periodically put a notice up at the pick up days about what needs to be done - weather permitting. Memberships are $375.00 for the 2004 year. That breaks down to about $16.30 per week. This is for a full share. Shares can be split but it’s your responsibility to find a partner to split the share. You will also need to work out how to split the share. Either alternating weeks or just taking half of what is a full share each week. We have a few work share positions available for past members. Those who are interested please call us and we’ll discuss with you what is to be expected throughout the season. Last year we teamed up with Morning Creek Farms who offered flowers on a membership bases and sometimes extra bouquets were there for you to purchase on pick up days. They won’t be teaming up again this year. But don’t despair we are in the process of setting up flower beds at the farm and will offer fresh bouquets to purchase through the year at the produce day pick-ups. Herbs too will be offered in more abundance with your share and we are starting to experiment with growing edible mushrooms. We’re excited about this year. There’s more and more to do and plan and try and it’s all interesting and challenging and rewarding. We are anxiously awaiting the start of the season and we hope you are too. Jim and Linda Rosselot Fall of 2003
One of the things I’ll remember about this summer is the butterflies. An array
of colors taking flight all around me as I planted, hoed and harvested. It
also and still is the summer of the uncontrollable weeds. Butterflies and
weeds. Does one predict the other? There’s always a question in the how to of
growing the crops and we, the farmers or gardeners, are always looking for the
answers in the clues. Fortunately, and the opposite, conditions change so fast
we rarely come to a good solid conclusion.
We had a rainy year. Above average for rainfall. The tomatoes stood under water twice this season and that proved to be detrimental for their yield. The kids and I planted twenty flats of onions started in our backyard early this spring. We should have pulled over 3000 onions this summer but due to the rain and weed schedule we lost most of them. We tried uncovering them twice by hand and by the time we would get to one end of the field the other end would be covered again. The diversity of vegetables on the farm is sometimes it’s own problem and we have to make decisions about what is priority and what isn’t. In that regard we salvaged what we could from the onions and tilled under the weeds. Near to the onions we planted edible soybeans. They came up lush and beautiful with weeds too. I noticed after some time the tops at the ends of the rows were being eaten. I thought, that’s ok there’s enough there to feed the deer and the CSA group and after a bit they will move on to some other tender morsel someplace else. They moved into the soybeans even more so I decided perhaps I should let the weeds grow up and detour the deer. That didn’t work either and they ate to their hearts content. Perhaps, you could consider your soybean share as a deer food share. Needless to say, we ended up tilling in soybeans stems, weeds, deer tracks and droppings. There was that awesome sweet corn! Thanks to Jim. When it comes to corn he knows what he’s doing. Our son, Morgan and his friend Joel can also take some credit for sweeping the field with hoes to get out the Canadian thistle. Our tomatoes, even with their problems, still tasted better than others I had sampled this summer. The peppers didn’t do what the catalog described so it’s back to the Big Bertha’s and Paradise Island peppers next year. Monday, Oct 27th , is the final pickup day for everybody, between the hours of 4:30 pm. and 7 pm.. Come prepared for a wagon ride, pulled by Babe and Esther, the two draft Percheron horses residing on the farm. There will be vegetarian chili, pumpkin pie and caramel apples served with cider and coffee. Help will be welcome! We are so deeply appreciative of your support through this year. Thank You Sincerely. Linda
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