*Sunrise over the open field. Photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, fresh sweet onions, carrots, summer squash, zucchini, purple kohlrabi, green cabbage, red cabbage, caraflex cabbage, fennel, red and yellow potatoes, broccoli, French filet green beans, garlic, garlic scapes, scallions, green curly kale, lacinato kale, spinach, baby lettuce, basil, cilantro, parsley, sage, oregano, thyme, and slicing tomatoes.

This week the fresh onions have beautiful green tops, so you can use the tops like scallions! I made some whipped butter with onion tops and garlic scapes that is a delightful spread on bagels.

CSA Bag Delivery Order Form

Fill out the delivery form by noon on Tuesdays.

CSA pickup and delivery days and times

Pick-Your-Own Flower Garden is Open!

Beginning this week and for as long as the flowers last, we’re excited to open the garden right above the barn for any CSA members to walk through, cut flowers, and watch the insects buzz along. It’s a fun and wild space to walk through, and a great place for kiddos to explore with all their senses: there’s even some edible flowers in there! We all enjoyed designing and planting this garden, and we hope that it will be an annual project we’ll get to share with our CSA as a thank you for supporting all the work we get to do. We will set up aspot with scissors and rubber abnds right inside the barn to be able to pick flowers. If you normally get a bag delivered, but want to try to skip the order form one week to pick up your veggies from the barn and pick some flowers, please do!

*Cleome is one of the first flowers to bloom abundantly in the flower garden. Photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News from Ryan

This week I read an interesting article sent to me through the Climate Adaptation Fellowship, an innovative program in which our farm is paired with a technical advisor to dig into the science of how our Northeast climate is projected to change in coming decades. We also get to design and implement practices geared towards increasing our farm’s resilience to weather extremes: extremes that are likely to become more common as we look to the future. This article reminded me of the importance of planning our farm for a changing climate: it’s titled Connecticut Farmers are Finding There’s No Easy Way to Deal With Climate Extremes. Connecticut’s weather has been even more rainy than ours these past few weeks, and it was striking to read how especially challenging the weather has been for farmers in that region. The article did a great job at summarizing the nature and scale of the challenge that climate change poses for agriculture, and summarizing some of the ways that farms can address those challenges. It also reminded me how, in spite of the hot, dry, and windy May that made it difficult to establish crops, and the exceptionally rainy July, we’re lucky that our weather hasn’t been more extreme this summer. Even though there’s a lot we can do to prepare our farm for a changing climate, the crop production that supports us and our farm crew is still dependent upon the weather.

When we catch up with people these days a lot of folks ask “Is all this rain good for you, or hard for you?” It’s a little of both. After a dry May and June, it’s been helpful to be able to put thousands of fall transplants—cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, fennel, lettuce, kohlrabi—in the ground without any need for irrigation. All these recent transplants look fantastic with the abundant soil moisture. Compared to the challenge of extreme drought, too much rain in July is a manageable problem for our farm. But a challenge of all the rain we’ve gotten this month is that it creates conditions in which a wide variety of crop diseases can proliferate. Depending on the crop and the disease, this can cause a issues such as unsightly spots on foliage, early defoliation and stunted growth, a shortened harvest window, or sometimes a total crop loss. One of the setbacks so far is Alternaria Blight on carrots: a fungus that causes small spots on the leaves and ultimately causes the tops to die back before the carrots have fully sized up. Usually this disease isn’t a problem until September, when we grow a fall variety that is resistant to alternaria. But the wet weather we’ve had means that summer carrots will be smaller than usual, but fortunately still sweet and tender. We have been applying some certified organic disease control products—some that change the pH of the leaf surface to make fungal infection less likely, some that utilize beneficial microbes to outcompete pathogens, and others that help to stimulate the plant’s own immune response—on our most vulnerable crops to help them thrive in conditions in which crop disease can proliferate. These certified organic tools are only so effective, but they can make a difference if they are applied preventatively, before outbreak occurs.