Farm & Field Update- August 29th 2018
Our friend and a local farmer Martin, owner of Markristo Farm, who grows our green beans and edemame, told us that just this morning he was contacted by four separate farmers asking if he had extra vegetables to sell so they could fill their CSA orders this week. This would have been great for him, except that he has also lost crops due to the extreme weather conditions we’ve had this season and therefore is unable to fill the extra orders they need.
We are harvesting vegetables that may be slightly short of meeting our standards aesthetically that we normally adhere to, even with our rule of growing more than anticipated to compensate for the unexpected weather related or disease related issues. A slight blemish on a pepper or eggplant for example that we would normally not accept for our CSA bags, we must use at this time and so we suggest that if you find a bad spot simply cut it out because the rest of the vegetable is acceptable and still delicious.
Bob decided this morning to go ahead and have us harvest an entire bed of celery earlier than expected because he was noticing spots on the leaves and some rot in the centers from so much rain. If left in the field to mature they would surely go bad. We still ended up cutting some of the bunches apart, taking out the bad centers all together and re-bunching. A lengthy process but we got over 100 more bunches by doing so. Desperate times call for desperate measures is the expression I’ve been thinking of today. We were concerned about the celery being too young and too small but upon tasting it, decided it is sweet and crunchy therefore better to have it small than not at all. As I was harvesting the celery I kept thinking of a song by Joni Mitchell, I changed the words a bit to go, “Hey farmer, farmer thanks for putting away your DDT, giving me spots on my celery leaves but you’ve given me the birds and the bees. Still, don’t it always seem to go, we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone”.
We want to thank all our CSA members in advance for being understanding of the slightly imperfect quality of some of our vegetables and the occasional last-minute changes we have to make in the weekly harvest list due to unexpected decreases in the quantity of an item during this challenging and uncooperative season.