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Wow!  This week’s share includes the following:

2 pounds of new potatoes
1/2 lb yellow wax beans -OR- 1 lb summer squash (zucchini and/or yellow squash)
2 cucumbers
2 fennel bulbs
1/3 lb bag of mixed cooking greens
1 head of red leaf lettuce
1 bunch of Red Russian or Lacinato kale
1 green garlic
1 bunch of chives
1 bunch of cilantro -OR- dill
1 pint of cherry tomatoes (on-the-farm pick-up CSAers)
1 lb big tomatoes (Portland market CSAers)

The new potatoes this week are a mix of Norland, Mountain Rose, and King Harry (the King Harrys are the white ones; the others are red varieties). The mixed cooking greens are baby Red Russian kale, Swiss chard, sensopai, and red mustard. Cook this mix up any way that you like to cook greens…steamed or, our favorite, a quick spin in the skillet with olive oil, garlic, salt, pepper, and perhaps a dash of soy sauce.

We managed to get enough cherry tomatoes for everyone picking up at the farm today. Hooray for that! For our Portland market folks, we have a pound of mixed heirloom and beefsteak tomats. The big fellas growing in the greenhouse are starting to come in, and we’ll dole them out as we can. I can already tell everyone that this will NOT be a very good tomato year, so really savor what you get! Next year we hope for drier weather and a return to large yields.

Having said that, however, this week’s share is a beast! 11 items for everyone…finally, a proper height-of-the-season bounty! We hope no one feels overwhelmed by all these veggies. We didn’t have 11 items in mind today, but so many things seemed to be coming in that we felt we needed to harvest like mad. I wish they could all be like this, but I have to be a bit of a downer and state that future shares will probably be smaller.

In spite of the return of some “big rain” (we got about 3 or 4 more inches from the weekend’s storms, and our fields are back to mud again), things are generally growing quite well. I’m very pleased with how the cukes and summer squash are doing. We really need to get a handle on our weeds, though, and I worry about catching up to those weeks in June when we weren’t able to get out into the fields to plant. Lettuce and salad mix may be in short supply in the near future. We apologize for that but want everyone to be “in the loop” as far as what we’re able to forecast for the coming weeks. But that’s tomorrow…today, enjoy the hot weather and the tastes of summer: cukes, tomatoes, squash, oh my!

Also, many, many thanks to CSAers Carney Brewer, Heidi Audet, and Heidi’s daughter, Kate, for their help here on the farm Monday morning. We all battled some weeds in the winter squash, and Carney stuck around long enough to help Kate Jones and I harvest the potatoes for this week’s shares. Thank you, thank you! We hope to see more eager weeders this Sunday. Also, if you’re stumped about what to do with your kale this week, try Carney’s amazing kale cakes!

This week’s share includes the following:

1/2 lb bag of salad mix
1 head of lettuce
1 lb bag of beets (farm and Portland market CSAers)
1 pint snow peas (Portland Allen Ave and Bridgton market CSAers)
1 bunch of Red Russian kale
1 bunch of scallions -OR- purplette onions
1 green garlic
1 bunch of herbs (choice between marjoram, thyme, or oregano)
1 pint of cherry tomatoes (for folks who didn’t get them last week)

For the record, our Friday and Saturday CSAers will probably get scallions as our purplette supply is depleted. Remember to keep your green garlic in the fridge and use it within about a week; green garlic doesn’t keep for nearly as long as cured garlic.

As for the beets…we apologize! The weather did a number on them…the rain brought on the weeds which have kept them small and the damp conditions made the greens not worth bothering with. Though small, they’re still delicious! We have more beets started in trays in the greenhouse and hope the next planting will fare better. Look for more beets (and hopefully beet greens, too) later in the season!
–UPDATE– That beet planting, in fact, gave out on us by the end of the week! As a consequence, some of you are receiving snow peas instead. Again, beets will be back in the future. Sorry for the craziness…

So, the weeds messed with your beets. Now, you can have your revenge and gain the satisfaction of personally saving some of your season’s crops. The blog post following this one is all about our upcoming Weeding Party/Farm Potluck in August. Read on, and let us know if you can join us in the battle against the weeds!

This week’s share includes the following:

1/2 lb bag of salad mix
1 bunch of purple top turnips
1 kohlrabi
1 bunch of scallions
1 green garlic
.4 lbs of snow peas
1 pint of sugar snap peas
1 pint of cherry tomatoes

As with the strawberries last month, the cherry tomatoes are gradually coming in.  Folks at the Portland and Bridgton markets got them last week; this week, some of our farm pick-up folks will get them, and we hope to be able to harvest enough on Friday for all of our Allen Ave. members.  If you don’t get tomatoes this week, rest assured that you will get them next!  We’re keeping our fingers crossed about the cherry tomatoes.  Though growing under cover in the greenhouse, the ground under them is still very wet from all of that June rain.  The plants are producing but struggling, so we’ll just have to see how the harvesting goes in the next few weeks.

Last year, we lost a lot of garlic to rot after we had harvested it and hung it up in the barn to cure.  In an effort to make an end run around this problem in another wet season, we’re giving green garlic this week and may continue to do so for awhile.  Green garlic is easier to peel than dry or cured garlic, but the catch is that it must be refrigerated and used within about a week.  As with the garlic scapes, you can use your green garlic for anything that you would usually use dried garlic for.

Word is back from the state Cooperative Extension lab up in Orono.  They found no sign of late blight on the samples I sent in but plenty of a fungus called Septoria.  Septoria loves this cool, wet weather we’ve been having and attacks the leaves of the plant, leaving trademark brown spots.  This fungus normally appears in August when the plants are usually well-established and producing fruit.  Not this year!  We will try to stay on top of this and pluck bad leaves from the plants in an effort to keep the fungus pressure down.  Just when I was ready to call up the extension office down in Portland and give ‘em hell about the late blight diagnosis, I was stopped by a phone conversation with Bruce Watt up at the lab in Orono.  His description of the symptoms of the disease and the speed at which it can take plants down seemed possibly accurate to me regarding some of the plants we pulled.  He also reported frankly that late blight is now all over the state.  We will keep a close watch on our plants, and if you’re doing any home gardening, we recommend that you do the same.

The weather in general seems to be turning around, and we are cautiously optimistic here at Summit Springs Farm.  (”Cautiously” I type since a big dark cloud is rolling in over the farm right now.)  Sonya will probably try to get the tractor into the fields in the next few days to till, enabling us to finally plant some fall crops like cabbage that have been hanging out in trays in the greenhouse for weeks during the monsoon.  I also really need to sow some brassica mix (mizuna, arugula, kale, tatsoi, etc.) for salad mix.

The weeds have LOVED this wet weather.  They are everywhere.  Weed pressure is inevitable with organic farming, but with such a long stretch of rain making hardcore weeding almost impossible, the weeds have really taken over.  We need help!  If you’ve been thinking of coming here to volunteer, this month would be a WONDERFUL time to do so and help us get these weeds under control.  Please consider coming up and call or drop us an e-mail to let us know when.  We try to take Sundays off, and on Tuesday and Friday mornings we’re busy harvesting for the CSA and farmers’ markets; any other days and times are fine!  Thanks in advance!!