*I love seeing webs among the food, photo by Adam Ford*

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have slicing cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini, purple kohlrabi, fennel, new red and yellow potatoes, salad turnips, broccoli, garlic scapes, scallions, baby bok choi, green curly kale, lacinato kale, spinach, baby lettuce, pea shoots, and cilantro .

Is fennel new to you? We call it “the sausage flavor” in our house. Many familiar sausage flavors have some amount of toasted fennel and coriander seed in them, so I often put fennel in things that I want my children (who really enjoy eating sausage) to eat. You can use the whole plant: bulb, stems, and fronds. All of it can be cooked or eaten raw. I am not a fan of licorice flavor, so we only eat it cooked in our house: fresh brings that light, bright licorice flavor which I believe is wonderful for people who like that, but it’s not a preferred flavor in my mouth. If it’s new to you and you want to give it a shot, you can start by using it along side garlic and onions, as an aromatic that you sauté with oil at the beginning of any recipe. This time of year, I sauté fennel with garlic and top pizza with that mixture. So good.

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Farm News

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Woohoo, I got to sneak in some actual farm work this past week, and it was a delight! (Since our day care permanently closed with covid, I get very little time with the plants and gardens, and spend most of my time either as a parent or office manager behind a computer.) We trellised some out of control cucumber beds in the tunnel, and below are some fun before and after pictures. The tunnel cucumbers initially seemed to be a failure: the cucumber beetles got ahead of them, and killed the tender growing tips of the plants. So we didn’t take the time to keep them trellised, since our expectations for the yields on such damaged plants were sadly low. But then, as if out of no where, the cucumber plants grew secondary shoots, and are now huge, full of vigor, and producing fruit. This is awesome, especially since cucumbers are my favorite summer delight, BUT it means that the cucumber beds got wildly out of control and needed some serious taming. We went in and trellised, pruned, and weeded, until all 450 feet of cucumbers were vertical. It was a slow task, detangling the vines and tendrils of different plants from each other or the weeds, but the results are gorgeous, and now we will be harvesting plenty of cucumbers from the tunnel until the outdoor plants kick in. What a gift.

The biggest thing on my mind around the farm these days is on pollinators. We used to keep honey bee hives on the farm, but a very persistent local bear would not respect any attempt at electrifying around our hives, so we finally gave up and returned our hives to Ryan’s dad, the master bee keeper who originally set us up with bees. We assumed the native pollinators, and our neighbor’s dozens of honey bees hives down the hill would be enough to meet our pollination needs. But our neighbor moved his hives this year, and this year we’re noticing their absence. This year especially, our zucchinis and squash plants are suffering from insufficient pollination, which means that the fruit are unable grow longer than 2-3 inches. In the short term, we’re hopeful that the honeybees and native pollinators will begin more visits to our zucchini and squash plants! In the long term, we’ve decided that we’ll need to resume beekeeping at the farm, and put more effort into protecting our hives from bears.

As a certified organic farm, we actively work to create habitat and conditions to host and invite native pollinators, such as planting herbs and flowers that provide food for pollinators throughout the season, keeping wild spaces, leaving milkweed sanctuaries, not spraying broad based (even certified organic) insecticides, etc.

Ryan and I have slightly different thoughts around pollinator observations this season. I am used to seeing a chorus of pollinators humming through fields of blooming cover crops, and always assumed it was both the honeybees and native pollinators. So this season, as fields of blooms seem uncomfortably still and quiet, I get concerned about this change as one sad visual clue of the climate crisis. Because I have been so concerned about this, Ryan headed out to an area of the farm where the milkweed is at its wildest to capture pictures of plenty of busy insects happily thriving… just to make sure that what I am really observing is the absence of our hives, rather an absence of native pollinators.

Ryan knows that the way to my climate concerned heart is to capture pictures of nature being resilient! Glad to see things thriving, and also looking forward to getting some honeybees back on the farm. (Maybe Soraya’s new chore will be taking on the beekeeping responsibilities since she loves bugs so much!) And it’s a good reminder that the kids and I should be building some native pollinator homes to hang up around the farm along with birdhouses and bat houses.

Next week we hope to catch back up on tomato trellising, transplant more later season crops, and continue the rhythmic work of preparing the next fields that are ready to seed.