Salsa Time!
We had a great day at the annual Heirloom Tomato Tasting on Sunday and got to meet many of our Hoboken members there. It was non-stop 4 hours of fun for tomato lovers who were able to taste both heirloom & hybrid tomatoes. Needless to say this will be what we call our “salsa” delivery week as you will have in your delivery everything needed to make salsa. Farmer Rich had to harvest your tomatoes and put them aside before the event, as we never know if there will be any tomatoes left! We were away from farming to get ready for the event & the event day, so your lettuces were harvested a day earlier than normal but were stored in the cooler.
We avoided a huge disaster this week! Rich noticed some oil dripping from the back of the delivery van at drop-off in Mahwah last Monday. Since this was a similar problem that we had one year ago he decided to get over to a favorite mechanic Joe, in Ridgewood. It was a seal on the read-end that needed to be replaced again (soon we’ll need to have the whole read-end replaced as the seals will continue to falter). But in putting the van up on the lift, Joe noticed that the inside walls of the tires had serious gash-like defects that could have blown at any time, especially with a heavy load going at high speed on the highway. The tires all had great tread and no defects on the outside walls, so no-one would have ever known that the tires were this faulty. Needless to say that Joe’s pick-up of this probably saved Farmer’s Rich life! Of course all the Hoboken/Jersey City Tuesday delivery was on the van and needed to be off-loaded. As I teach on Monday nights I was unable to pickup Rich to get him back to the farm to pick-up his old S-10 pickup, but my Dad came to the rescue.
What started out to be an inconvenience turned into a blessing.
Fruit – This week is we have picked up Flaming Fury Peach from Windy Brow Farm located in Newton, NJ. Since peaches were still available (& won’t be for long) we decided to include peaches again this week. You’ll soon be getting apples.
From the Fields: Tuesday, Leslie removed the “stumps” left by the groundhog feast in the Franklin greenhouse & prepared the bed to be transplanted with Oriental greens. She transplanted in the fields some mixed lettuces & bok choi for fall deliveries. The turnips did not germinate well and will be plowed up & replaced by radishes. The dicon radishes, beets, red mustard & cilantro all are doing well. Farmer Rich hopes to be able to get into the back field this week to pick rocks & till it up for an expanded field for next year.
Weather Report: We had drier weather this past week and Farmer Rich had to start up the irrigation system. It continues to be cool at night, with a low of 44ºF. It really has been great working weather, but not great to tomatoes to ripen up. Farmer Rich even had to put gloves on in the early morning hours.
Pick of the Week: click on the links below or to the right to bring you to the delivery specific to your pick-up location. Deliveries will be of similar variety & poundage, but may contain different items. Occasionally, some crops are ready to harvest but not enough to deliver to all our drop-off locations. What we do is start to filter them in each week to a different drop-off until there is enough to delivery to everyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment