Grim Reaper

Hello out there!

I am in the process of responding to balance questions - if I have not answered you I will sometime this week. Thanks for your patience! Payment is due in full next Monday. 

The crew has been spending their time this week ripping out, systematically, and in order of reverse importance, all of the hot weather crops from the three greenhouses. Bye bye eggplants, peppers, basil, and tomatoes. In that order. You can breathe, they stripped the plants of their fruits (if they had any) before they pulled the plants out of the ground. The fruits are stock piled in the distribution shed. Actually, don't hold your breath for eggplant. I must say, what a disappointing crop in general. We thought that if we babied them and gave them the most prime-est real estate on the farm in the greenhouse they'd perform like crazy. We were wrong! I'm not sure what we'll do about that crop in the future. They want Italy (or California). 

It's counter intuitive to pull out all of those plants right now. They are big, green, bushy, and covered in fruit. It feels wrong to kill them. As it goes on this farm, spinach and chard in February is much more important than a couple more weeks of peppers and tomatoes in late September. If we're to get good plantings of winter greens in the greenhouses we have to seed between the end of September and the first week or two of October. Which necessitates ripping out all that productive, hard worked for summer bounty a bit before it's really it's time to go. It makes me feel a bit like the grim reaper, but with more judgement than the grim reaper is supposed to embody. Life/death cycle of farming.

This week's vegetables: 

spinach

celery - as a group you guys are tripling your weekly consumption of this fall essential.

beets

carrots - the fall planting is mature enough to start harvesting now. Carrots til June.

arugula

parsley

pac choi

tatsoi - use like pac choi

tomatoes - seriously on their way out

hakurei

peppers - we ripped out all of the peppers from the greenhouses last week to make way for winter greens. Before we pulled the plants we stripped them of peppers. There is a glut and soon there will be nothing.

radicchio - heaven on earth for some, a bitter hell for others. 

kale - fantastically bodacious

chard - ditto

endive

cabbage of some kind

u-pick:

unlimited:

flowers

basil

parsely

chard

kale

dill

cilantro

cherry tomatoes

beans

limited:

hot peppers - 2 gallons

tomatillos - 2 gallons

paste tomatoes - 5 gallons

raspberries - 2 QUARTS!!