Harvesting for the CSA

Farm News

Our New Intern

This week we welcomed Tommi Berron to Transition Farm.  We have spent the past few weeks finding a caravan and "fitting" it out so that Tommi had a place to stay.  If you have not yet guessed or do not know us, we are a young family.  Inviting an intern to live on the farm was a huge leap of faith...especially sight unseen.  Tommi is from Munich! Something about Tommi's timing and his emails seemed perfect, so we took a chance.

Tommi is a lovely young man and has fit wonderfully into our family and our farm.  And just when we needed some extra help as...

CSA Summer Share Starting Early

Everything has come on a week early!  Our CSA Summer Trial is starting Friday the 13th!  We feel so blessed because our biggest worry is...what are our members going to do with ALL of these vegetables!  Not only has everything grown well, there is so much of it!  You can view the CSA newsletter to see everything that is in the box.  And so, after all these weeks of seeing the food grow, the  harvest has begun!

With our true desire to not only build a business to support our family, but also provide fresh, local, organic food to the community, we have already given away our surplus of beans and zucchini.  At this time there appears to be more to share, so we will continue our relationship with the Salvation Army food kitchen in Rosebud and the local church.

Brassica Row Covers

The row covers on the brassicas seemed like such an easy solution to growing brassicas in the summer without caterpillars eating the young plants before they can get established or being a nuisance during food preparation.  Sure, it was more work then spraying the organically approved Dipel- cutting stakes to hold the hoops, digging trenches on either side of the bed, setting the cover in our almost constant wind without the tender fabric ripping or getting stepped on.  But, we did it. The initial blissful feeling as the white moths bounced off of the fabric soon faded as after our first big spring storm, the fabric started showing wear from the wind blowing it over and over across the hoops.  The wear turned into a hole.  Out came the duct tape!

But despite our efforts, a moth or several got in.  We were alerted to this one morning when we went on our morning walk and saw about 15 white moths INSIDE of the row covers!

The morning was spent removing the covers and examining the damage.  It appeared as if eggs had hatched inside the row covers and lived out their life cycle to adulthood.  Even though the plants are eaten, they are still healthy and developing heads.  We removed any unhatched chrysalises, checked for more caterpillars and put on new covers.

Two mornings later, and more moths inside.  The forecast was predicting a 40degree day.  We were really unsure if the brassicas would cope with that heat under a row cover.  We removed the covers and have yet to replace them.

We have been cutting beautiful heads of broccoli and I have only found one teeny-tiny little caterpillar. There may be more.  The latest storms with their unyielding wind have kept anything from landing on the plants for now!

Summer Hail

And that leads us to every farmer’s worst weather...storms with hail.

Huge winds were already unleashing on the farm in the early morning on Wednesday this week.  We left the house wondering if we were going to find the corn flattened, the tomato trellis broken and the brassicas uprooted.  Thankfully the only damage from the storm has been a few capsicum plants completely snapped off at ground level.  The poor capsicums were already stressed from so much continual rain and overcast conditions.  They just wanted the ground to dry up for a day. Some of the flowers have also had limbs snapped and battered.  But everything else is thus far faring OK.

I have already begun to notice the sun is not rising so early.  And the tops of the onions are falling over.  With eggplant and capsicums coming on, tomatoes starting to fill boxes, and corn that is over my head, I hope that you are enjoying summer!

Gardening notes for this week have been posted.  These gardening notes offer further insight into the biodynamic and sustainable farming practices that we are using as well ideas for the home gardener.

We are also trying to put seasonal recipes on the site under the 'Our Crops and Recipes' heading.  This may take some time to get right.  We also welcome any recipe submissions.  We would all love to try a new, perfected seasonal recipe.  Please email any through.  You will be credited as the source.

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On the right of the Seasonal Notes page, there are links to previous posts sorted by month.  You can also click on any of the bold words under the heading “TAGS” and search for any posts on those topics.