summitspringsfarm.net

Happy weekend to all! It’s still muggy, but at least we got a little rain last night with more expected today. Some crops, especially those we’ve just put in the ground in the past couple of weeks, really need it!

This probably goes without saying but Sonya has canceled the tomato canning class that was scheduled for today. No tomatoes (or very few) means no canning, alas! We’ll try again next year. We do have a TON of cucumbers, however. They are not picklers…they are Marketmore slicing cukes…but they make for great bread-and-butter pickles, and we may try making relish this weekend. If you’d like some extra cukes to play with, give us a call or send an e-mail.

I also want to echo an e-mail that Son sent out to our members after the Tuesday pick-up here at the farm: PLEASE do not leave your car running while you’re picking up your veggies. We know it’s been hot and that a cool car is a wonderful thing, but it’s wasteful and the exhaust is smelly and annoying and leaves dead spots on the grass. So, save some gas, put a little less carbon into the atmosphere, and turn off the ignition! We appreciate it! (This goes for you folks who pick-up at the U. U. Church on Allen Ave. each Friday, too!)

This week’s share includes the following:

2 pounds of potatoes
3 cucumbers
1 lb zucchini and/or yellow summer squash
1 bunch of carrots
1 kohlrabi
1 green bell pepper
1 bunch of onions
1 head of garlic
1 bunch of cilantro
1 bunch of herbs: choose sage, mint, or thyme
1 pint of cherry tomatoes -OR- 1 lb large tomatoes (for full share members only)

The potatoes this week are Carolas, our favorite variety…smooth, yellow, buttery goodness! The wee onions today are either Ailsa Craig sweet onions or red onions. Once again, we’re looking at a pretty disappointing onion year, though we’re happy to have “small” rather than “none”. Onions are one of the first seeds to be sown in late winter (we get ours going around March 1st), and last year at that time, we didn’t yet have our greenhouse completed. We started the onions inside our house and kept them on our sun porch during the day for a couple of months until the construction was done. Needless to say, the seedlings were not as hardy as we would have liked, but we were optimistic that they’d recover once they were transplanted out into the field. Alas, within a week of going outside they were hit by a hard frost followed a few days later by a torrential downpour (the first of many that year, as it turned out). The little onions just couldn’t handle it and all but disappeared. I think later that summer we found about three onions out there…that was it. This year, the transplants looked great, but that darn June weather just stunted the onions; we also suspect that the beds where we planted them may have needed more fertility (via manure or organic fertilizer) than we’d anticipated. We’ll try again next year and keep our fingers crossed. On the brighter side, a large portion of one of the beds is devoted to leeks, and THOSE are looking pretty nice!

I’m sorry to report that our sad excuse for a tomato “season” is winding down, folks. The cherry tomato plants are looking pretty spent, plus we’re having a problem with our Supersweet 100s that I’ve never seen with cherries before: sunburn. It’s not an altogether uncommon thing with the big tomatoes: the tops get too much sun and turn a yellowish color, and the flesh underneath becomes white and tough. This spring, the sun was so elusive that our plants became very spindly, reaching up rather than bushing out. This lack of foliage has resulted in sunburned cherries! Just the red Supersweets, though…the orange Sungolds seem unaffected. This combined with a decrease in production means that this may very well be the last week for cherry tomatoes. The bigs may last a bit longer, but the bell is tolling for them, too.

To state the very obvious: it’s hot!! This hot weather has been great for those veggies who love it. The cukes, zukes, and yellow squash are still producing like crazy, and we’re starting to see some peppers, too. We’re continuing our aggressive planting strategy, and this week we got more lettuce, brassicas, Napa cabbage, radishes, and beets into the ground.

Thanks once again to Miss River Foss for some help at the end of last week with weeding and potato harvesting!

Everybody stay cool!

Check out this excellent article in the New York Times about the northeast’s troubles with late blight this season. It’s entitled “You Say Tomato, I Say Agricultural Disaster“. It’s especially revealing how they suspect the disease got such a foothold up here this year, via big box stores selling infected seedlings from down south.

As Sunday winds down, we Summit Springs Farmers are tired but relieved to have had some significant weed pressure relieved as a result of the efforts of some very dedicated CSAers and friends!  Thanks to all who came to our first-ever weeding party:  Rick and Kyle, Jean, Becky and Jacob, Joelle, Eddie, Anna, and Ellen!  Hooray!  As a group, we finished off the jungle overwhelming the winter squash in Field 1 before moving to Field 2 to whip through two beds of onions and leeks.  Your efforts probably saved us a solid week’s worth of weeding, so thanks again.  Thanks, too, for the yummy food afterwards at the potluck.  I didn’t bring the camera out into the fields to capture the weeding…too muddy…but did take some shots inside during the meal.  Check ‘em out at the bottom of the post.

As a postscript of sorts to the last posting about the tomatoes, I want to also report that yesterday I spent the morning cutting down our potato plants.  Normally what happens is that once the plants die, they are cut or mowed down.  The tubers have reached their full size by this point, can remain safely underground, and can be harvested whenever they are needed.  We simply chose to bump us this process by a few weeks.  The plants were still alive and many of them looked great, but some definitely showed signs of late blight.  By killing the plants now before the fungus has a chance to spread, we hope to save the crop.  The resulting potatoes will perhaps be a little smaller, but smaller is better than none!

Our old friend and fellow farmer, Megan Haney, opened her farm’s weekly e-newsletter thusly:

“Had Dr. Seuss lived through this summer, he might years from now be hailed as the man who gave us … “The Year the Grinch Stole Tomato Season.”  Only the culprit in this case is the Late Blight, and Cindy Lou is nowhere in sight.”

Our culprit wasn’t just late blight, though I think late blight definitely put in an appearance.  It was also early blight, septoria, and general wetness.  I think we were in a bit of denial about our field tomatoes over the past couple of weeks, hoping that if we just left them alone they would eventually recover and do their thing.  A walkthrough before today’s harvest, however, revealed the painfully obvious:  our tomatoes were going nowhere (dying plants and very, very little fruit production) and needed to go, as they possibly posed a treat to our still reasonably healthy greenhouse tomatoes and our potato beds.

So, if you smelled or saw smoke rising from our hill this morning, those were our tomato plants meeting their maker.  Kate and I pulled the plants while Sonya tended the fire, which we decided was the way to go rather than bagging the plants and hauling them to the dump as we did last month (this was precautionary; since late blight spores are so easy to spread, any infected plants must be removed from the premises or burned…simply composting them is not wise.)  Of course, the rain returned and snuffed out our fire, so I’ll be trying to finish the burn tomorrow while the gals are at the Bridgton market.

Just to state the obvious, this is a huge bummer.  Tomatoes are an important part of our business and are usually a big part of everyone’s shares around this point in the season.  Last season (not a great one, either, but one that’s looking better and better by comparison) we were able to give folks several pounds each week for many weeks.  We will continue to pass along what we can get from the 2 rows of cherries and 2 rows of “bigs” growing in the greenhouse…savor them!  The end of our field tomatoes raises all sorts of other issues as well, and I’ll quote Megan again since she states it so well (Megan and Sonya worked together for several seasons at Riverbank Farm in Roxbury, CT.  Megan has since started her own veggie operation, Marble Valley Farm, in Kent, CT, where she has a CSA and a hopping weekend farm stand.  Megan’s e-newsletter is well worth subscribing to simply to experience the author’s humor, intelligence, enthusiasm, and clever wordplay.)  She says:

“As much as I’ve been in denial about it, I can’t overstate the importance of this epidemic to myself and my fellow vegetable farmers in our community, most of whom count tomatoes as an anchor crop.  We’re far better off than the 19th-century Irish, but we’re looking at significant income losses, some pressing short-term management questions (how to prevent the blight from affecting our potatoes?), as well as some long-term ones (is this year’s weather a consequence of global climate change, and are we going to have to let go of tomatoes as a cash crop?).”

Good questions, all.

Thanks to our Allen Ave. CSAers for braving the rain this afternoon to pick up this week’s bounty and for your kind words of support and encouragement during the very wet end of what was, obviously, a very challenging day.