Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we'll have green beans, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, sweet peppers, hot peppers, edamames, cucumbers, and herbs.  There might be a little okra starting on Monday, just enough for those few of you who are extremely okra-needy.  When it warms up, there will be more, enough to give a little bit to everybody who wants some.

The tomatoes continue to look marvelous.  I think there is less leaf disease in the tomatoes this year than I have seen in years, and they seem to be making lots of fruit.  We've got about 100 plants in our second planting that we expect to start picking next week.  They should hold up until frost.

Peppers, chilies, and eggplants are not so nice.  I'm not sure why, but they just are  not setting any fruit.  We have about 1000 eggplant plants, which means we should have about 10,000 eggplants over the course of the season.  We've been having trouble just getting 200 fruits per week.  Same thing with the chilies - 200 plants, taller than my waist, yet almost no chilies.  The stressful summer weather must have turned off some switch in them.  The 2000 sweet pepper plants have plenty of fruit, but it's all pretty puny.  I'm holding back giving you green peppers in hopes that they will fatten up and ripen pretty soon.  I want you to have big piles of sweet and tasty red, yellow, and orange peppers instead of shrimpy green ones. 

The onions this week will be a variety called "Candy".  You can eat them now or they should be fine if you want to store them for a couple of months into the fall.

The green beans are from the 5th planting of the season.  Although we had a few beans earlier in the summer, they weren't very nice and the plants were sick or weird and we abandoned every planting before we expected to.  This crop is fantastic.  Huge plants, healthy leaves, lots of beans.  Planting number 6 looks good, too.  I'm hoping that we will have beans until frost with the two final crops. 

The rain last week was very helpful.  We had .6", then 1.5" on Saturday.  I've turned off the irrigation for a while.  The rain on Saturday messed up a pretty good plan to have 35 new Cornell students dig potatoes for their service project, but we needed it so badly, I couldn't be too disappointed.  However, there are still many thousands of pounds of potatoes in the ground.  If you and your kids want to help get them out, there will be plenty of chances to join us this fall.  The students were able to get the hoophouse cleaned out for me, a daunting task that I was avoiding, and I am VERY thankful for their help.  It was a great day, even with the lightening and rain.

The sunshine this week is going to be wonderful.  All we need now is to get the temperature up around eighty degrees where it is supposed to be this time of year.  Warmer days and nights will help blooming things to make  fruits, small things to get bigger, and green things to ripen.

This Saturday, September 10, the Southeast Linn Community Center is hosting a spaghetti dinner to benefit the youth programs of the Mt. Vernon and Lisbon Parks and Recreation Departments.  Every year, the cities help the Center by giving us swimming pool passes to hand out to families who need them.  This event is to add to that fund.  Spaghetti is $5, serving is from 4:00 until 8:00 pm at the Lisbon High School Cafeteria.  I hope you can attend.

Some families still owe me some money on their share.  I've been going through my records trying to sort it all out and will be sending you a note pretty soon.  But if you know who you are, maybe we could talk about it this week and come up with a plan.  Thanks.

See you this week,

Laura