Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we have potatoes, onions, garlic, beans, sweet peppers, tomatoes, kale and collards, herbs, chili peppers, summer squash, watermelon, and cantaloupe.  I think I'll also be able to find some cucumbers, swiss chard, and the last of the edamame.  After today, we're expecting an uncharacteristically cold week, so I don't know what's going to happen with the garden between now and Thursday, but I think we'll still have most things.  The week after that, who knows? 

I am wishing for a good rain today.  We're now back in the rut in which we found ourselves in May - small crops, lots of them, sitting there, waiting for a rain.  The problem with waiting now is that they are going to run out of time.  So I suppose it is time to start irrigating again, although I don't want to.  Next week, I'm quite sure we can cut some lettuce, and pretty soon after we get just a little more heat and moisture, we should have turnips, kohlrabi, lots more lettuce, a new crop of beans, beets, carrots, cabbage, and all the wonderful fall greens.  We will harvest winter squash starting in October.

I haven't grown cantaloupe in several years, and now I remember why.  While they are absolutely the most sweet and wonderful lopes you've ever tasted, they almost all have a spot on the side that was sitting on the ground.  The problem with cantaloupe (that aren't sprayed multiple times with fungicides and insecticides) is that they ripen, and then two seconds later, they start to rot.  So, pick the best one you can find, keep in the frig, cut off the spot, and enjoy them soon.  We should have more next week.

Big thanks to a team from Cornell that came on Saturday and helped us get the last of the potatoes dug.  YIPPEE.  I LOVE crossing things off my list!!!   The potato harvest was disappointing this year, about 40% of what we expected, but still enough to get us through the fall.  And the quality has been good.

I've got flyers out on the table for "Landfall", a world music festival in Cedar Rapids this week.  Lots of great music to enjoy, and much of it is free. 

My neighbors about 3 miles away, Kevin and Marie Lynch, have too many APPLES and want to sell some to you.  I've tasted the apples; they are gorgeous, big and crisp, and unsprayed.  U-pick at their place, $.75 per pound.  Kevin and Marie will be here this week handing out samples in case you need more convincing.  Make arrangements to pick when you get your veggies, or call Kevin at 721-8218.  Kevin's email is above.

The email for Charlotte, our bread lady, is also above.  If you want to know her weekly offerings in advance, zap her a note, and tell her which night you pick up so she can get you on the right list.

See you this week,

Laura

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we'll have tomatoes, sweet peppers, eggplant, kale and collards, watermelons, garlic, potatoes, onions, beans, summer squash, cukes, herbs, hot peppers, edamames, and a few cabbages.  Whew!  Lots of stuff!  Tomatoes are really perfect right now, but the cooler nights have slowed their ripening, so they may be a little greener than usual.  Just leave them out at room temperature (NEVER put a tomato in the frig), scar side down, in one layer, uncovered, and they should fully ripen in a day or two.  Eggplants, squash, cukes, and peppers will likely be similarly affected by the cooler nights.  But the people are loving it!

Watermelons come in all sizes, shapes, and colors, and I've got almost no idea what you are going to find inside any particular melon.  You just gotta take your chances.  So far, all the ones we've dropped or kicked and just "had to" eat since they were already damaged have been wonderful.  We'll have melons for two weeks for sure, maybe three if they will keep that long in the field.   We've also got lots of cantaloupe which should be ready by next week, maybe some for this Thursday.  There might be some mud on the bottoms of the melons since they mostly formed off the plastic mulch.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  I won't be able to wash them for you.  We've only got enough energy around here to handle the melons one time.

The rain this week was welcome.  We received 1.3" on Wednesday morning, then .7" more on Friday.  Tuesday, we worked like crazy to get every inch of open space planted to fall crops, mostly greens.  A little late in the season, but we were waiting for rain and for cooler soil temperatures so the seeds wouldn't die.  I'm not convinced that there are enough fall crops, but we've got nowhere else to go that is still within reach of the irrigation, so it's the best we can do for this year.  I'm still a little afraid that the rains could end and I could be back to watering.  Hope I'm very, very wrong.

The replacement hens that have been living in the pen inside the open shed have started to lay eggs reliably.  Tonight, the few remaining old ladies in the moveable house are coming out and the young hens will be moving in.  It will be good for them to get on good pasture and out of their tiny pen for a few months.  If everybody just buys what they need for the week, I think we'll have enough to keep you all happy from now until the end of the season.  (And after.  The problem with having 120 hens is that you still get 10 dozen eggs per day, even in the blizzards.  They quickly become a burden if people don't keep eat them through the winter.)  Eggs will be in the walkin cooler.  Ask for help if you have trouble with the door.  It's tricky.

Here are the dates for vegetable pickup for the rest of the season, so you can put it on your calendar now.  Sept 10/13 (this week), Sept 17/20, Sept 24/17 (last time in the evenings). Everybody then switches to Saturdays, 10:00 until 2:00, Oct 6,13, 29, and 27.  If you're a family that's got kid soccer games those Saturdays in October and can't be back here by 2:00, we'll work something out when we get to it.  The best stuff is in October, so I want everybody to be able to take advantage of it.

See you this week.

Laura

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we'll have German Butterball potatoes, onions, garlic, kale, eggplant, green beans, summer squash, tomatoes, sweet peppers, and basil, cilantro, and parsley.

The German Butterballs are nice, versatile potatoes.  Because they only had about an inch of rain in their whole lives, they are small, so I'm going to give you only a pound or so to make sure that everybody gets to taste them.  We'll try them again next year and hope for bigger spuds.

We're done with the white and light yellow summer onions.  If you've got any at your house, you know they don't store very well.  Use them!!!!  You're not going to get any better onions anywhere.  We're moving into the storage onions now, yellow and red.  They store longer (but not forever!) because they have less sugar in their cells.  They're still great, but not as sweet as my favorite summer onions.

Same thing with the garlic.  I've mostly been giving you Musik, a great big sweet garlic that looks and tastes great, but it will start growing if you try to keep it into the fall.  Use it!!!  We've got just a little more Musik, then I'll start switching you over to the less sweet, longer lasting, hardneck storage garlics like German Red and Chesnock Red.  I can't give you all the garlic we harvested this summer; gotta save some of it to plant this fall so we'll have more next year.

Tomatoes continue to ripen slowly.  I anticipate lots of tomatoes of all shapes, sizes, and colors sometime very soon.   This weekend, we even found one that is green when it is ripe.   I sure don't know how that happened!

We had wonderful rain last week which is going to make a huge difference in the fall garden.  Last Sunday/Monday, we ended up with .5", then on Thursday morning we had a whopping 2" of rain in about two hours!!!!  It was fantastic.   We've had about 5" of rain in the last three weeks, a real unexpected blessing.  No more griping about the weather allowed around here, at least for a while.  (Although I am happy that it is warming up this week.  We need the warm nights and hottish days to grow peppers, tomatoes, and squash.)

There are four kitties here who need new homes.  Immediately.  They are eight weeks old now, and ready to go.  If you want one, or know somebody who wants one, let me know.  Their mother has started taking them on road trips and I'm afraid we're going to lose a couple to the wild if we don't get them out of here. Feral cats are a HUGE environmental disaster.  They eat EVERYTHING they find, but mostly endangered, neotropical, migratory songbirds.  I don't want to contribute to that problem.  As always, kitties are free.

I'll be putting my nomination papers for Linn Soil and Water Conservation District out on Monday for you to sign if you are interested.  I need 25 Linn County residents to nominate me for election.  Assuming that happens, this will be my 4th? or 5th? election as a soil and water commissioner. 

There will be a daylong IOWATER training on September 7 at Lowe Park in Marion that will be especially tailored to residents of the Indian Creek watershed, although anybody can attend.  Many of you live in the Indian Creek watershed, a 93-square mile area which includes Marion, Robins, Hiawatha, Alburnett, and some of northeast Cedar Rapids.   (I think this will link you to a map of the watershed.)   IOWATER volunteers monitor water quality in the streams near their homes and report their findings to the Iowa DNR for their water quality database.  No experience or science background needed.  If you'd like to know more, zap me a note and I'll send you the brochure.

See you this week,

Laura

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we'll have sweet corn, eggplant, zukes, green beans, cabbage, potatoes, onions, garlic, kale and collards, cucumbers, basil and cilantro, tomatoes, and a sweet pepper.  The corn will be Serendipity on Monday, and if the last planting of Bodacious gets its act together, the Thursday people will get it.  But it pollinated at a very stressful and hot time, so I'm not sure it's going to be worth harvesting.  Just have to wait and see.  The rain today should help it.

Eggplants, zucchinis, cabbage, collards, and tomatoes seem to like the conditions we've had for the last few weeks.  They have all been quite nice.  The green beans, on the other hand, have been abysmal.  We'll take the last picking off of the first bean crop this week, then I'm knocking it down to make room for fall cabbage.  There should be another bean planting ready to pick next week or the week after. 

Peppers have started to make harvestable fruit, but not much of it, so we'll start slow.  I always like to leave as many green peppers as possible in the field so they can turn red and yellow, the stage when they taste really wonderful.  Then we can have lots of them in the fall.

All the tomatoes we've picked so far have come off the first 85 plants, planted on May 6.  There are four times that many plants that were planted on June 6.  They are setting fruit now.  We'll probably be picking from them in a couple of weeks.  If they all make it, we should have lots of tomatoes.   I'll give you just as many as we can pick.  Although I probably shouldn't be making too many big plans until I actually see red tomatoes in the box.  Might jinx it.

In addition to the 1.5" of rain that we got on August 4th, we also received .3" on Wed of last week, plus .1" on Thursday about 2 minutes after we got everybody out of here and shut the big doors.  Just in time, too, because that one came horizontally.  It's drizzling as I write this, which is great.  I've planted quite a lot of the fall crop already and it is SOOOO good to use actual rain instead of irrigation water to get the seeds to germinate.  I think they can tell the difference when it is the real thing.  Plus, the moisture makes the ground soft enough to till, which means I can get that much more garden ready for fall.  We'll be planting like crazy for the next week or two.

I took the irrigation pump to town.  It's dead.  Plum wore out.  Shot.  I didn't know a person could wear out a Honda motor, but I guess you can.  Actually, you can do it in only 10 weeks.  I bought a new pump, bigger, with a bigger Honda motor last week.  It would be a wonderful thing if it just had to sit by the side of the pond for a couple of months.

No doubt you have been noticing the work on the wetland at the end of the field west of the shed.  The original wetland had been there for 10 years, but it was riddled with muskrat tunnels and didn't hold water very well.  I had a chance to repair it and re-enroll it in a conservation program from USDA called Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP.  In CRP, marginal ground is taken out of production and restored to prairie, woodland, or wetland.  The farmer gets a rent check from USDA every year for 10 years, and the environment gets some relief.  Wetlands do lots of good things, including providing habitat for wildlife (but I still hate Canada geese), pollinating insects, and natural enemies of insect pests.  They also hold water in the uplands after a storm, which reduces that magnitude of flooding downstream.  The water they hold is released slowly, which keeps the stream below flowing more steadily. Some water soaks down even lower to recharge the aquifers from which our drinking water comes.  Wetlands also filter soil, fertilizer, and chemicals that run off from the crop ground above them, sending clean and filtered water to their streams.  And wetlands provide diversity and beauty on a landscape that has not much going on except for corn and soybeans.  All good use of taxpayer money as far as I'm concerned. 

Here's a thoughtful and reasonable commentary on drought, corn, and the next Farm Bill.  If you eat, breathe, or drink water, the Farm Bill matters to you.

I'll be gone on Monday, in Madison attending a workshop for farmers breeding crops specifically for organic farms.  I'm really looking forward to it, although I am wondering how I'm going to make it through the afternoon without a nap.  The heat wave was so brutal, there was nothing to do in the afternoons for the last month except nap, and now it's become a habit.  Hope I don't embarrass myself.  Back here at home, the farm and the Monday night pickup will be in the very capable hands of my excellent crew. 

See you later,

Laura

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we have new potatoes, nice white onions, kale and collards, kohlrabi, bok chois, lettuce, fresh garlic, and cabbage.  I hope we can find enough broccoli, summer squash, and beets for everybody, too.  New potatoes are potatoes that were just dug and haven't had time for their skins to cure.  The red potatoes we dug at the end of last week are SOOOO yummy, especially the skins.  Don't peel them, just brush lightly and cook them skin and all.  Unfortunately, they - like the onions and garlic, aren't irrigated, so their yield will likely be reduced from what I had expected at the start of the season.  But they are just beautiful and taste so good.   Onions and garlic seem very nice, too. 

We keep the irrigation going six days a week, but rain is better.  We had 1" last Sunday morning, then .6" on Friday night.   Finally, a week with enough rain that we could still prove it 48 hours later!   It should have boosted the beets, broccoli, and squash to finally get big enough to harvest this week.  I sure hope so.  Gardens need about 1" of rain per week - and probably more with irrigation - in order to have high yields and good quality, well-shaped fruits.  I don't know how western growers do it.   Just keeping the soil moist enough to keep things alive is a pretty big challenge.  And our pond is shrinking fast, not because of irrigation so much, but more from evaporation and wind.  Luckily, it is quite deep so it still holds lots of water, and hopefully, it will fill up in the fall so the fish will be happy over the winter.

Heat this week is going to be tough on the broccoli, lettuce, chois, but most of the other things can take it. The winter squash, cucumbers, peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes are looking marvelous with their plastic and straw mulch.  We've not had too many disease or bug problems, but I did notice lots of damage to leaves of many things from the wind on Friday.  Chard is pretty shredded and may not be harvestable for another week.  We'll figure it out when we get to the garden.

This week, we plan to dig the garlic and get it curing.  The garlic we give you will be fresh.  If you don't want to use it right away, leave it on the counter so it can dry out a little and it will keep longer.

Unfortunately, this is the first newsletter some of you are getting this season.  I had a hard time getting my lists all set up this spring, but I think everything is figured out now.  If this is your first note from me, please check out the past newsletters to find what's been going on around here this season.

See you this week,

Laura