Boulder Belt Eco-Farm

 

It's week 15 of our food adventure, where has the time gone? Things on the farm are mixed. On the good side of things we are getting rain but not too much rain. Most of the storms have missed us. The rain gets about 3 miles away and evaporates than reforms to the east. We have gotten a couple of short frog stranglers that has left behind about an inch of rain over the past week and that is about perfect. The crops are growing well enough and there seems to be low bug and disease pressure. Oh and we now have air conditioning in the store so the front door will be shut and needs to stay that way. the AC will keep the fridges from working so hard and will mean when the tomatoes start to come in (I expect there will be cherry tomatoes in your shares next week) they need to be stored between 65 and 75 degrees for best flavor. In this heat the store was getting into the high 90's and that is way too hot for most things, including us humans working in the store. Now it is comfortable-cool and dry. Do is the house as we put in an old AC unit that we got for free somewhere a few years ago (but we think we will have to replace it soon, like next week. with a new AC unit as they are so much better in about every way-efficiency, colder, more bells and whistles, etc..). For most of my life I have rejected living with AC but this summer has turned me into a believer. It is so nice to have a cool and dry environment in this hot soup we call the great out doors.

On the bad side of things it is hot and humid, both Eugene and I are injured. I threw my back out at the farmers market last Saturday and it is still bothering me but I can at least move and work (it is best that I do move and work as that loosens it up). Eugene put a potato fork through his index finger on his left hand on Monday and has to try and keep the wound clean and dry (about impossible to do around here) He went to a doctor yesterday as the wound looked really nasty Monday night and was still bleeding after 12 hours. Now he has antibiotics and a relatively clean bill of health and no infection and no stitches as it is a puncture would. None of this should effect your shares in the coming weeks as we are pretty used to working all banged up. You have to be hard core to do this job, market farming is not for sissies.

The other not so great thing is the tiller is still not working but we have found a place that carries the parts for the engine on the machine (it is no longer made and Italian) just south of us in central Kentucky (they are also on 127). We knew about this place but figured it was too far away from us to use but in an act of desperation Eugene called them to see if they had the part he thinks he needs and they did, in stock and they ship (cheaply). So sometime this week we should have some sort of starter coil or whatever the part is. Hopefully it is the correct part. If not than the tiller will still not work and Eugene will order another part and possibly in the near future the entire engine will have been rebuilt. And in the mean time he will prep the fall beds by hand (which we really want to avoid as we are heading into the period where over 100 beds need to be prepped for fall winter and doing this by hand is out of the question. Finding a BCS tiller that is as large as what we use to rent seems out of the question as well). This crisis is making us seriously consider buying a tractor but that will set us back about $15K, which we cannot easily afford. But a tractor would mean an easier job for us aging farmers and being able to produce more food on our farm. stay tuned for updates on the tractor tiller issue...

Please remember to provide a reusable bag, if you have not already to pack your food into and please return all bags, rubber bands, the plastic covering on the berry boxes and anything else we use to pack your food so we can reduce our carbon footprint a bit

No recipe this week

What's in the Share

Arugula-the arugula is back, I hope for a while but with this hot weather it may decide to bolt and due to equipment issues and wet soils no more has been planted yet so we probably will have a gap. So enjoy it while you can
Ailsa Craig Onions-more sweet onions, probably twice what you got last week
Cucumbers- we are now picking a new variety of cucumbers, pickling cukes. these are one of the better cukes for fresh eating because of their think skins, which is also why they are perfect for pickling. You get 2 or 3 cukes
Beets-a nice bunch of chioggia beets
Scallions- a bunch of scallions
Chard-a big bunch of chard (over 1/2 pound)
Basil-another hearty bag of basil
Garlic scapes-This should be the last of them
Garlic-2 corms of garlic
Eggplant-one big black Galina eggplant and one skinny dark purple Asian eggplant
Zucchini- a couple pounds of a mix of the 3 kinds we grow-Patty Pan, Costata Romanesque and Zephyr
Potatoes-a mix of red and white
Bonus Item-White Peaches that the apple guy, Scott Downing gave us last saturday after market. These need to be eaten ASAP and will have soft spots, but they are the best peaches I have had in years AND THEY ARE FREE! If you want more, come to the Oxford Market this Saturday and buy some from the Downing's
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Good morning,

It is a new month and we have several new members bringing our total up to 8 (I would like to have 20 but we take what we are served. It does looks like we may get to that point the last two months of this food adventure). As we have new members I will get to business matters first. Your shares will be ready to pick up after 4 pm and will be located in the fridge to your right as you walk in the store (it is the only fridge in the front of the store). Your share will be in a bag (or sometimes two bags) with your name on it. We do ask that all members provide a couple of reusable shopping bags if they do not want their stuff in plastic Kroger or Wal-Mart bags. You have between 4pm Wednesday and 6 am Saturday to get your share, after that they go with us to the Oxford farmers Market and will be donated to the Choice Food Pantry in Oxford (they come by the farmers market every Saturday to get donations. Last year we gave over 1000 pounds of food). The store is open pretty much all the time so you can get you share whenever you can if you cannot get here Wednesday afternoon/evening. Month to month members, renewals for August are due July 21-you can leave cash or check with us when you come to pick up your food.

We have a farm tour coming up next week on Tuesday July 13th at 6 pm. This is a great opportunity to see your CSA farm and learn more about Organic farming. I seriously doubt that we will have the time to host a pot luck farm tour so if you want to see the farm in a formal manner this is your chance. on that note please feel free to  walk around the farm, this is one of the perks to being a FSI member. To get to the farm walk between the barn and the store buildings and you will see a silver gate. Open that and walk through (be sure to close it behind you). If you go to your right you will be in the market garden if you go to your left you walk by the pond. While in the market garden be aware of where you are walking and never walk in garden beds as you will injure/kill the crops, even beds that look fallow probably have something planted.

Life on the farm is ever changing, just like the weather (okay, pretty much because of the weather). We have gone from too much rain to no rain at all and it is stressing the plants because their root systems grew shallowly to handle copious amounts of moisture in the soil. You see, plants grow root systems according to the weather. Dry weather means the roots go down deep searching for water but when there is a lot of rain and the water table is high the roots are very shallow. When the water dries up than there are problems because the roots are not where the water is in the ground. All the rain in June, we had over 16 inches here at the farm, meant lots of shallow roots being set. I see a lot of field corn that is incredibly stressed all over SW Ohio. The soy beans are beginning to look bad as well. On our farm things are pretty happy, I suspect, because our soils are full of organic matter (OM) and retain moisture much better than the fields that are fed chemicals and have a low OM percentage. The basis of good Organic Farm management is not avoiding pesticides but rather growing great healthy soil. The soil is the soul of the Organic farm (any farm, really, but the chemically managed farms are definitely lacking in OM and soil life).

And weather changes on a whim around here. In June we were dealing with too much rain and heat which meant weeds that grew fast and could not be hoed or pulled because the soil was simply too wet. this also meant fungal diseases git started. We don't seem to have much of an issue with this other than the tomatoes that once again have some blighty ick attacking them. We will get tomatoes from the plants but not huge amounts, which is fine as we have finally, after 17 years of growing, started cutting back on the number of tomato plants we grow. We have found that there are way too many for sale at farmers markets for us to sell them at a price that makes it worth growing them (and at times we can't give them away, there are so many) so we are down to 385 plants mainly for you, our FSI members and ourselves (I put up many bushels of tomatoes made into juice, sauce and salsa for off season use). At our peak we grew over 1000 tomato plants.

Now it is hot and dry which makes for miserable working conditions-it is no fun to work outside when it is 90F and humid so we try to get to work early in the day and than quit during the heat of the day and get back at it about 2 hours before dusk. I would love to have a whole summer of the weather we had over the 4th of July weekend but that probably ain't happening so we deal with the heat as well as we can.

okay I really need to stop here and get out and harvest stuff for your shares

Recipe

Roasted Garlic

1 or more garlic bulbs
Olive Oil

Preheat your oven to 350?. Cut the top 1/4 inch off of each bulb of garlic. Drizzle with olive oil and put in a covered dish or pan and put in a preheated oven for 30 to 40 minutes.
When cool enough to handle separate the cloves and squirt out the roasted garlic onto bread or your favorite dish

What's in the Share this Week
Garlic Scapes-probably the last week for these
Scallions-a bunch of scallions to use as you wish
Basil-a nice big bag (over 1/4 pound) of basil for pesto or whatever
Chioggia Beets-These are an Italian heirloom beet that is AKA the candy stripped beets because of its' pink and white concentric circles. the proper pronunciation according to Martha Stewart is Key-o-gia, though I was taught chi-o-geeia
Zucchini-you will get a large costata romanesque this week. Do not let the size fool you these are tender, small seeded and deelish even when large. these can be used for far more than zucchini bread at this stage
Cucumber-2 or 3 armenian cukes which I recently learned are a melon which is why they are so mild and sweet.
Raspberries-the Latham raspberries are almost at an end for the year but soon enough we will be picking the Heritage raspberries which are in full bloom. You get 1 1/2 pint this week
Onions-around a pound of the heirloom Ailsa Craig sweet onions
Garlic-3 corms of garlic. I should know the type (we grow 5 different hard necked garlics) but alas I don't at this point in the day
Chard-a 1/2 pound bag of bright lights chard, one of my favorite greens. Expect to see this almost every week through fall
Carrots-these are our spring planted carrots which did not get big due to the wet conditions and weed pressures. They do have some carrot fly damage but are over all nice carrots. this will be the only carrots we have until September
Plums-purple plums from our lone plum tree. I find these rather tart bit they do have good flavor. You get a pound

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Welcome to week 12, the season is rushing by. This is a light week for us as several members will not get their shares this week either because of vacation or the fact they signed up for a 4 week membership and June has 5 Wednesdays in it so this one is a bye week for them.

The weather has improved drastically and the crops are feeling better about life. Cantaloupe and water melons that looked like they would fail are coming back. I would not say they are thriving but they are going in that direction and should give us some production (though I suspect they may do really really well-only time will tell). because it is drying up we are hard at work hoeing and hand weeding as many beds as possible in a day (plus we must harvest raspberries, zucchini, cucumbers, strawberries and black raspberries every day which takes many hours). we are in a race to get this maintenance done before the soils get too dry and resemble concrete. I figure we have around another 2 days before that phenomenon happens and we have a handle on the most of onions, most of the beans, potatoes and some of the winter squash. Tomatoes, melons, peppers and eggplant are all planted on landscape fabric mulch and thus do not need such weeding so that's around 100 beds we don't have to futz with. But that also means there are over 150 beds that do need weeding or tilling (which ain't happening as the tiller is once again out of service and Eugene, being a man wants to investigate every angle before giving up and taking the machine to the shop. So we may be without a tiller for months. but I figure that's his issue-if he wants to farm without this important piece of equipment so be it. We are past the early season of intensive tilling and won't be getting back into that for another couple of months when we start in on serious fall and winter planting)

The rain did have some good aspects to it. It was keeping the insect population down and it filled up the wells around here so when it does dry up and we need to start irrigating we should have enough water to do that and supply ourselves. 3 years ago during that awful drought that killed so many trees in Butler and Hamilton Counties we came close to running our well dry. If that had happened we would have had to drill a new well which is very, very expensive at over $10K. We have one of the deeper wells in the area so we were safe.

But now that the rains have ended we are getting bug pressure. I found and killed hundreds of Colorado potato beetle larvae on the potatoes last night. The cuke beetles are coming out enforce on the cucumbers, squashes and melons and the Japanese beetle population is really ramping up (but from what I hear we are not in the same league with Hamilton County where the JB population sounds down right scary). We are going to try an experiment with the JB's. We have a pond stocked with fish and we have a JB trap. In the next day or two we will figure out how to put said trap on the pond so that it attracts the JB's from the grapes and berries to the trap where they will fall into the pond and be eaten by the fishes. We are well aware that these traps tend to attract JB's from other yards but since we are not in a suburban situation and will put the trap in the center of our farm I don't think we will attract anything but our own population. the other thing we need to do is apply beneficial nematodes which will eat the JB larvae (AKA white grubs in the soil). We have done this in the past and it does work well. But you need damp but not wet conditions for it to work, so maybe in the fall.

The share this week is one of the best this year. Unlike any others this one contains food we did not grow-sweet corn. The corn is non GMO but not Organic and from a farm about 12 minutes west of  us. We have known the young man growing it since he was about 4 years old and growing up on his daddy's Organic farm. Now he is 20 and married and has a farm of his own. And it looks like he is going to get into raising produce and sell it direct. This is his first year growing sweet corn and while it is not the best we have ever had is is very good and a great effort for the first time. This young man, I believe, is going to be a great farmer in another decade. Normally I do not like to buy and resell produce but we don't do corn (not enough room), this is locally grown by a well known, to us, source and will be buying it for the store as it really increases sales for us. So we figured you guys would like to get some as well

The shares will be ready after 4 pm. Remember to return all bags, boxes, pieces of plastic and rubber bands that came in your share-we want to reduce our use of such things and will reuse all

We have a farm tour coming up on July 13th (Tuesday) at 6 pm. This is a great way to be more involved with your FSI farm and see what's going on with the 4 acre market garden.

Recipe

1 cup basil
1 cup Italian parsley
2 or more cloves of garlic
1/2 cup walnuts or toasted pine nuts
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese (freshly grated is best)
1/4 cup olive oil
salt to taste

In a food processor put in the peeled whole garlic cloves and pulse a couple of times than add the nuts and cheese and pulse again than add everything else and process until smooth. This can be frozen (without the cheese) for a long time and will last in your fridge in a tightly sealed container about 7 days. Pesto can be used many ways. Mix a tablespoon with a stick of butter and you have pesto butter. Mix a tablespoon with a cup of mayo and you have pesto mayo and of course it is great tossed with hot pasta.

What's in the Share

Chard- 1/2 pound bag. The first of many weeks of wonderful chard. If you have not had chard before it is prepared just like spinach
Zucchini-3 pounds of a mix of zucchini
Cucumber-4 Armenian cucumbers in your share
Ailsa Craig Sweet Onion-either one big onion or two smaller onions. These heirloom onions are very mild and well suited for salads and sandwiches. they are not the best cooking onions.
Potatoes-1 pound of either red or white taters. these are true new potatoes meaning they are freshly dug and not yet cured. Most people think new potatoes are small potatoes but that is not true. Those small potatoes are actually grade B taters and not new at all.
Basil-a big bag of basil, at least 1/4 pound
Sweet Corn-1/2 dozen. A bi-color called Temptation
Scallions- 1 bunch
Red Raspberries-2 1/2 pints
Strawberries-1 pint. We grow day neutral strawberries, meaning these will come in throughout the rest of the season until beyond frost. you won't get them every week as these will not produce every week as they tend to come in waves. But you will get them again and again throughout the season
Parsley-1/4 pound bag
Garlic-2 corms of fresh garlic (actually about 1/4 cured) I do not know what kind you will get this week of the 5 kinds we grow. Incidentally, the garlic is finally all out of the ground (a good 3 weeks early) and drying. It looks like we will lose about 10% of the crop to rot (and if you have gotten some less than good bulbs, I apologize-some of them looked good than a week later were rotten) but that is no where near a crop failure and we will have great garlic well into the next year.
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