*These gorgeous striped cherry tomatoes are starting to come in! Photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have spaghetti squash, purple kohlrabi, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, fresh sweet onions, rainbow carrots*, summer squash, zucchini, fennel, garlic, green cabbage, red cabbage, caraflex cabbage, red and yellow potatoes, French filet green beans, garlic scapes, green curly kale, lacinato kale, baby lettuce, mini romaine heads, pea shoots, arugula, basil, cilantro, parsley, oregano, thyme, slicing tomatoes, cherry tomatoes!

*Rainbow carrots will be a baby-sized mix of red, orange, and purple carrots. They were a fun experiment to try this year, but the wet weather led to foliar dieback that prevented them from fully sizing up. A later planting of carrots looks very good now, and will hopefully get to grow to full size in a few weeks.

And keep picking your own flowers in the garden across the driveway from the barn when you pick up your veggies at the farm! So many of you have shared your enjoyment of picking those flowers, and really the pleasure is all ours to share those bright little rainbows with you all.

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CSA pickup and delivery days and times

*It’s definitely tomato season. Photo by Adam Ford*

Farm News

We transplanted lots of fall brassicas, seeded winter greens (already?! wild!), kept harvesting everything, and tucked in over 3000 straberry tips to root in the propagation house…. more on that fun strawberry adventure in next week’s newsletter! The heat was welcomed for the garden, but always less pleasant for the farmers working in it. The hornworms have had quite a feast on the tops of plants in the tunnels, and the flowers are making everyone pretty happy.

Perhaps the most joyful event this week was when Ryan found a swarm of honey bees on an apple tree near the newly arrived hives. He hopped off the tractor, called his dad for tips, invited the team and our kiddos to watch, and then knocked that swarm into a new hive box. Just a few weeks ago, we had no hives on the farm… but after Ryan’s dad brought us 2, and with Ryan catching this swarm, we now feel lucky to have 3 thriving hives in the backyard buzzing around through all the veggie fields. If you are unfamiliar with swarming bees, they are kind of magical: They are generally docile and don’t sting since they don’t have a hive to protect. They are clustered somewhere like the apple tree, waiting to hear back from scout bees about a suitable new home, and lucky for us, we found them, before they found something better. What a gift.

But the International Panel on Climate Change released a new report this week, and that’s pretty much where my head has been since reading it. When consuming news about the climate crisis I have a sense of grief and hopeful, determined committment all at once. It’s sad to hear the realities of where we are headed without rapid, transformational changes to energy consumption, and feel like… If we haven’t been able to collectively, radically change how our human civilzation consumes and lives with ample information since well before I was even born, is it realistic to hope that we will find the collective social will power to do anything with a new report? And yet, what’s the alternative? Quit farming, and drink margaritas on my porch hammock? (That does sound pretty sweet.) But as a kid who grew up watching Captain Planet and Fern Gulley, every new climate report makes me feel more committed to not giving up. And it’s also making me query, what other ways can we contribute to solutions? Having enough small and medium farms that prioritize soil health and mangement will be important as large scale, soil degrading agriculture experiences cracks in the systems with more extreme weather events; but farming appropriately for a changing climate is only one tiny piece of the puzzle, since individual actions can only do so much to change our future trajectory when we really need large scale systematic changes.

These are the questions I think about when I observe the bees swarm, the kids picking veggies from their own garden, a monarch chryssalis, the newly hatched baby birds chirping in a nearby tree, the kids trying to catch amphibians hopping through the beets, water strider dance parties on the moving creek water, goats grazing on multifloral rose, chipmunks running away from the propagation house with cheeks full of newly seeded seeds…. What else can we do to make sure all these critters (and their critter grandkids) still have a habitable earth? It’s time to throw absolutely all the tools at this problem.