Summer Staples

After a few weeks without much trace of it, we have much-needed precipitation in the forecast! We experienced another moment of catharsis and renewal during this ever-ebbing experiment in whole food production.

There isn’t a lot of automation involved in our irrigation strategy. Like other systems on our regenerative farm, it requires time, attention, and effort- three of our most valuable resources allocated with patience and planning.

We’re reluctant, but during dry spells like what we’ve experienced this June, when it becomes sadly obvious that we can’t rely solely on the sky and must take the matter into our own hands, we have to move a lot of water, hundreds of gallons of it, specifically out to our two far-away 5,000 square-foot summer garden blocks.

We stock a small trailer full of 55 gallon barrels, fill them up at the house with a rainwater/fish waste blend collected and stored in a reservoir. Our drains and downspouts feed rainwater into the reservoir, it’s cycled through a fish tank/ potential aquaculture system, and can be ultimately pumped out to our irrigation trailer.

We then have decisions to make. Referring back to the perennial pie chart distributing time, attention, and effort, we have to determine- What resource is most available to us?

So we hitch that irrigation trailer, loaded with a couple hundred gallons, to the jeep and haul it out to the big gardens. If time is the resource most available to us, we drop a car battery-powered water pump in the 55 gallon barrels, attach a hose with a wand and get to work gently watering the bases of hundreds of tomatoes, peppers, and other summer bushes, one by one. The water moves automatically, but the process is slow, requiring a lot of time but not much effort.

If we’re well-rested, hydrated, and motivated, with effort being the resource most available to us and a deficit of time, we irrigate differently, traditionally. We use a bucket brigade strategy. We park the loaded trailer at the top of a row, fill up five gallon buckets, and get to work schlepping, drenching, and splashing- one bucket at a time, like yoked yaks. While this requires an objectively unreasonable amount of effort, it’s completed in maybe a quarter of the time.

Maybe, some day, we’ll find that attention is the resource most available to us and that automated, well-designed and attended-to professional (but plastic) drip irrigation systems are necessary.

So it goes.

Our Week 6 harvest will include the following whole foods and ornamentals:

Carrots

Funky and crunchy roots. We’ve been cutting off the tops this season as it has made harvest and delivery easier/more convenient. While not useless, there are few practical culinary uses for these, so we’ve judged that they’re better off discarded for our convenience and recycled in our compost pile.

Cherry Tomatoes

Sun Golds are our choice cherries. There are a few Supersweet red varieties peppered randomly in the garden, but as one of our shareholders said last week, Sun Golds are in fact the “best cherry tomatoes ever!”

Zucchini

Summer squashes are beginning to fruit which means we are less than a month away from being sick and tired of Zucchini :)

Green Cabbage

Green cabbages will be harvested this week. We’ve learned that it takes a whole lot to grow a large cabbage head like one might expect at the supermarket. Like Sweet Corn, Cabbage is an insatiable plant preferring loads of nutrients (fertilizer) to produce big, broad leaves but more importantly- to finish off strong with a dense, full crown. Our purpose is to regenerate and sustain a soil ecosystem capable of providing these levels of nutrients naturally with minimum external inputs- especially without synthetic, petroleum-based fertilizers. Referring to recent global conflicts, I think we have all learned, or been reminded of, a great deal about the international politics of fertilizer availability in the past year. Something like half of all food consumed globally, meat or plant-based, could not have been grown without synthetic fertilizer- a provocative and unsettling statistic.

Potatoes

We’re averaging about 70 lbs of potatoes harvested from each 50-foot row, which should allocate about 3 pounds/week for our shareholders. Keep these stored in a relatively dry, room temperature location without too much sun exposure.

Green Carmen Peppers

The peppers haven’t had any issue with the dry spell and continue to produce abundantly. Mild peppers this week, no heat.

Beans

Our first harvest of young, tender Purple, Green, and Dragon Tongue beans will be available this week. Purple beans are so useful. They’re easier to locate and harvest off the plant. At first it’s a disappointment that they ultimately turn green when cooked, but we’ve found this to be surprisingly pragmatic. When we prepare beans, we typically boil them until tender and then throw them in a pan to crisp up with butter, salt, and pepper. It can sometimes be tricky to determine when the beans have boiled long enough to be tender but not too long to get slack and rubbery We’ve landed on a strategy to cook purple and green beans together- when the purple beans get close to the same color as the green beans, they’re ready to move to the skillet. It may not be fool-proof, but it’s fool-preventative. We will do our best to include all three varieties currently available with each share.

Garlic

Garlic bulbs, having had some time to dry out and cure, should last a good while. We will continue to distribute this harvest regularly with the newly-delivered bulbs being more shelf-stable over time. Keep your potatoes out of the sun, but don’t worry about shading your garlic. Store in a dry location.

Basil & Parsley

Basil to compliment your cherry tomatoes and Parsley for egg salads, potato salads, and coleslaw.

Eggs

Chickens have been the significant challenge of the summer so far. We plan to have full dozens available this week, but many variables have contributed to inconsistent, below-average laying rates. We are doing our best to keep up and while we continue to address predators threatening our flock, other sources of stress, not excluding drought, contribute to decreased production.

Flowers

Erin’s creative and eye-catching, fresh ornamental arrangements are back in the mix this week.

Happy July everyone! We appreciate you all.

Erin & David