A Hint of Sunshine !
We hate to keep moaning about the weather, but we had another 5 ¾” of rain this past week. There were a few times that the clouds parted and the sun did shine, but not on our harvest days. The crew were in the fields harvesting in the rain on Saturday & Sunday morning.
We had our Olde Lafayette Village Garlic Gathering on Saturday & Sunday and in your delivery you will receive some of the garlic varieties that we had available at the event. Unfortunately Saturday was mostly rainy, but on Sunday the sun came out for the better part of the day. It was great to see a few CSA members who stopped by.
Renee took the photo below at the Franklin Greenhouse of the small brook that developed after the rains this week.
The whole greenhouse was flooded. We have set up the greenhouse with raised beds so all the planted crops were safe but Renee had wet feet!
The upper greenhouse on the farm wasn’t much better, but instead of a small brook had about 4” of mud to walk through.
From the Fields: Field work was limited due to the heavy rain during the week. The crew kept busy cleaning & sorting garlic.
At the Franklin Greenhouse, Renee sowed all the beds with Buckwheat, Sunflowers and MicroGreens as we have little time to left for anything else to grow before the end of the season. They are all up and growing well so we anticipate their harvest being within the next week or two.
Some of the late transplanted crops might produce better than anticipated. The Daikon radishes and lettuces are doing well. The tomatoes are winding down. This week might be the end of the tomatoes, but we may be able to squeeze out another delivery next week. We have a nice stock of onions and winter squash, though we are having storage problems with both. The sunchokes (Jerusalem Artichokes) will be delivered, though small, as the stand was blown down during Hurricane Irene. We usually have watercress, which usually does well in the wet weather, but in typical Catalpa style, the stand did get washed away.
Weather Report: Frost is on the horizon, but at this point there is not much left for the frost to kill. The forecast is for the lows being in the high 30’s with a warming trend during the latter part of the week. We are looking at a window of opportunity to prepare beds for planting garlic later in the month (see Trip to the Farm Planned below).
Animal Report – We haven’t been reporting on any animal damage lately and we have finally figured out why – we think they have all drowned!
The Monarch butterflies and Blue Birds were seen in abundance this past week, perhaps on their migratory routes
Fruit Report –The apples are from Soons Orchard in Middletown, NY.
TECH NOTES - We have our OWN Community Toolbar that you can install in your Web Browser! Quick links to all our content: Newsletters, Harvest Identifiers, Facebook, Twitter, search, weather & more. Follow this link and then install http://jerseygrown.ourtoolbar.com/
Trip to the Farm – TENTATIVE date –October 23rd
· All CSA members are invited to help out planting garlic for the final trip to the farm this year
· Start Time: 11:00 am on October 23rd (tentative date – we’ll keep you posted each week in the newsletter)
· Planting Garlic is a great family activity
· We’ll starting popping the garlic then proceed to the field to plant followed by mulching
· We’ll break for a late lunch (around 2:30 pm) with Farmer Sue’s famous campfire recipes
· Please RSVP so that we may plan lunch & refreshments
Week of October 3rd - 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 at anytime during the season. 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.
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