The season really starts when we leave the tunnels and begin harvesting greens from the field. Seven beds a week, rain or shine, now through October. We shocked some new crew by pointing out they now know what they are doing every Monday and Thursday morning for the next 5 months; this is the rhythm of the farm.
Good Friday Night, Farm Friends.
The market trailer is parked in position for loading tomorrow morning, and the cooler holds some sweet new treats: the first bunches of beets and carrots, a hefty pile of our favorite red butter lettuce, some mini-romaine heads, bundles of chard, kale and collards, beautiful full-size boc choi. We’ll have radishes and salad turnips, and all the leafy greens : from sweet mild spinach and salad mix to zesty arugula and spicy mix. It’s the final hurrah for the mild spring mix, so lovers of that blend, be sure to make it out this week. The rain will all be over by market morning (says the eternal optimist and the obsessive forecast-checker, both), and it should be a great day for getting out, greeting your neighbors, and loading up on good veggies.
Members, you are starting week 4 of your farm feedbag, and you should have no trouble this week filing it up! Get to market fairly early if you are intent on those carrots or beets. More will be on the way, of course, and we’ll be sure to harvest more for Tuesday’s hosted pickup time.
We won’t have any starts at market, but will have our extra tomatoes, zucchini, cucumber, and winter squash starts available for purchase at the farm along with the first pickup window for folks who signed up for the garden-starts packages. Mary will be there to get gardeners sorted, and answer questions (don't worry, she hasn’t really been banned from market, but this spring has included a lot of catch-up work on Saturdays that she has been leading).
Continue on for various recent scenes from the farm over the past two weeks. But first, a few off-farm thoughts:
It can be strange to write about our excitement for beets and carrots, our thrill at the thought of feasting soil microbes, or the challenges of trying to teach ourselves how to train and lead a team through a season of doubts and worries, when we know that the weight of grief and loss in communities affected by recent acts of violence is so much heavier than anything we carried here this week. Like many, we don’t know what to do. We continue to carry the compost, the carrots, the harvest totes. And we try to hold and care for our community at large as well. Thank you for being a part of it.
With greens and grattitude,
Mary and Noah, and all of SweetRoot Farm
Have you found any morels yet? We are long overdue for a tromp in the woods, whether fruitful or not, but we were lucky enough to be gifted a bag by some farm members. If you have any, however you got them, we highly recommend this simple dinner: sauté them with some onions, butter chard or kale/ chard cooking mix and a couple of eggs. It stands alone, or pairs with a good slice of toasted sourdough (try a loaf from The Sour Doe, just down the block from us at market!)
It’s been a few weeks since the last newsletter, because, well, it’s just that time of year. As you can imagine, a lot has been going on. Last week we spent the post-market afternoon getting the winter squash ground ready for planting on Sunday, to make sure the plants didn’t get overgrown in the greenhouse. 15 beds of winter squash and pie pumpkins (well, and one bed of ornamental gourds just for fun) now occupy the middle of the “middle ground” field. Tomatoes in the big tunnel are growing enough to get pruned and clipped to their strings; the second wave in the “caterpillar” tunnel settled into the ground last week.
It may be hard to imagine, but this time of year is not just for planting the things for spring and summer. Winter eating prep starts now: this week, this was in the form of mowing down our overwintered cover crop blocks with a new flail mower for the tractor. As we have learned the hard way, the mower on our BCS walk-behind tractor has its limits, and it is easy to grow a hefty and satisfying soil-feeding stand of rye that will stop it in its tracks. The new tractor flail, though, chopped the tall rye to a juicy green pulp no problem. After mowing, we water the block and then cover with a silage tarp to give the worms and soil microbes the perfect warm dark workspace to digest all that down to create a seedbed for the winter storage roots—whose planting date will be here before we know it.
Behind the scenes of small farm greens harvest: repairs and maintenance on the Quick Cut Greens Harvesters by Farmer’s Friend, LLC. We always just refer to our harvester as “the friend” and this week we cut apart a couple of older friends that luckily had broken in different places, and Chuck’s Welding just down the road was able to weld the parts back together into a good-as-new friend. Thursday morning, with the heat coming in, we were able to run two friends at once and get many cart-loads of greens stashed away in the cooler before it got too hot.
At their annual vet checkup recently, all three farm pets (Malaya, Zukes, and Radish) free-roamed the exam room together, providing emotional support to each other and much amusement to the staff. Malaya’s excellent health for her estimated 12+ years of age was attributed in part to her lifestyle on the farm, of “getting to just be a dog all day.” She does take it seriously, this job as a farm dog, but her collection of footwear for napping on is getting a little out of hand. At the peak, she had lovingly relocated 7 shoes and boots from the mudroom to her favorite bed by the barn without making a single matching pair.