Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we'll have leeks, Ailsa Craig onions, fresh garlic, basil, cilantro, new red potatoes, green beans, summer squash, kale, cabbage, collards, broccoli, kohlrabi, and a few cucumbers.  We finished digging garlic last week and it is fabulous.  I need to save enough back to plant more for next year, but I'll be giving the rest to you over the next 3 or 4 weeks.  To finish curing it at home, just leave it out on the counter until you need it.  The flavor is simply wonderful.  You'll be spoiled for grocery store garlic after you use the home grown.  I've enjoyed it so much that I plan to grow an even bigger patch of it for next year.

New potatoes are also a summer treat.  "New" means "freshly dug", not "small" as you might think when you see them in the store. (Those small ones in the store are just rejects from the main potato packing line.  Good marketing makes you think they are something special.)  Freshly dug potatoes are only available this time or year.  The skins taste great and really should be left on the potatoes for you to fully enjoy them.  Our new potatoes this week are the Red Norland variety, and maybe a few Yukon Golds.  They are pretty large for so early in the season, and the plants are still alive and making the potatoes even bigger.  All this rain was at least good for something.  Expect more good potatoes for the rest of the season.

The plants in the Brassica family - kale, broccoli, cabbage, collards, kohlrabi - are suffering quite a lot from the rain and humidity.  Many of them are dying from very serious leaf diseases, although we've found some varieties seem to be able to resist disease better than do others.  People can't catch plant diseases from eating diseased plants, but we sure do notice the poorer quality of the produce.  I cut up three cabbages this weekend.  Two of them were great, but the third was yucky, and the yuck wasn't visible from the outside.  If you got some of those unexpectedly yucky brassicas last week, please let me know and we'll see if we can't give you a little more this week to replace them.

Onions also are suffering from lots of leaf disease.  I'm pretty disappointed in the onion yield, but there's not much we can do about it without using the very dangerous synthetic fungus-killing products (fungicides).  Once again, variety matters.  Unfortunately, the Ailsa Craig onions, which should be bigger than softballs, died young and mostly didn't get much bigger than tennis balls.   Too bad, because they have great flavor.  I planted lots of onions, so we will have plenty, but not the abundance that I know you like.  Maybe next year.

We will be going after the first green beans and first cucumbers Monday morning.  I don't think there will be millions of either, but enough to get a good taste.  Yields of cucumbers and summer squash should be high as long as it stays so warm.  We were delayed in planting beans this spring, so there we might not have them every week, but if we can continue to get a few seeds in the ground each week, we should have them until it frosts.  Almost nothing is better than fresh green beans in the late summer.

I have more raffle tickets this week, so please remember to buy a few.  Ticket sales keep the Southeast Linn Community Center operating.  We appreciate your support.

The farm open house and field day is coming up fast.  Sunday, August 1 is the big day.  From 2:00 until 4:00 will be an open-pollinated corn workshop for farmers from Iowa and surrounding states who are interested in breeding their own field corn and saving seed.  The field corn I grow and that you can see behind the neighbor's house as you leave the farm driveway is an heirloom variety that has been on this farm since 1903.  I've been breeding and improving it for the last several years and am looking forward to showing my work to other farmers so they can learn to do the same thing on their farms.  This part of the open house will mostly be farmers, but you are certainly welcome to attend if you are interested in learning more about how corn is bred and improved.

The main part of the open house is for shareholders and the public to come look at the gardens and farm to see what we are up to.  This part of the open house starts at 4:00.  We'll tour the gardens and you'll see what we are growing and learn something about why and how we do what we do here.  We're going to have a show-and-tell from the ISU researcher who is studying native pollinators in squash and melons.  I'll talk a little about the conservation practices in place to encourage the rain that falls on this farm to infiltrate rather than running off.  We'll learn something about bugs and plant diseases, and learn how we manage the farm as an ecosystem that produces food for us.  There will be a light dinner from 6:00 until 7:00.  Everyone is invited to attend the field day.  There will likely be visitors here from all over the state since the event is being promoted and co-hosted by Practical Farmers of Iowa.  I hope you can come.  I think you will enjoy it.

Monday people:  Sounds like it might be another wet and interesting afternoon.  You're having really bad luck this year.  If we have tornado or high wind warnings, Andrea and I won't be in the shed.  We will have run up the hill and will be sitting it out in my underground house.  Please don't drive out here until the storm passes.   There's no good place to keep you safe if it gets real bad.  So stay home and come here later.  I'll stay open a little later if we have weather problems. 

Here's a link to an interesting article by Wes Jackson, an agriculture thinker who I have appreciated for many years.  He's a little wild (that's why I like him), but I think he might be right.  Knowing that farm policy is the driver of most farmer decisions, he believes that we need to start now making policy with more long-term perspective if we ever hope to improve the environmental sustainability of food production in the US.  His big idea is perennial grain crops.  It's wild, but it might work. 

See you this week,

Laura