Week 9: July 31, 2023

We are now at the halfway point of this year’s CSA. This feels a bit like a milestone in that the big transition from seeding and weeding to mostly harvesting and maintaining starts to happen around now. We are even starting to think ahead to (gulp!) fall and winter by deciding what cover crops to plant in beds where all of the veggies have already been harvested. I am hesitant to dream quite yet, but maybe I will even have a chance to catch up on the mountain of paperwork that has been piling up since May and is in desperate need of organizing. Take a look at my desk these days. And yes, for those of you with good eyesight, that calendar on the wall is from 2022. Will I get around to taking it down before the end of the CSA season? I dunno, but I wouldn’t wage any money on it.

Week 8: July 24, 2023

The big news this past week was, of course… it rained!! We had a solid one inch fall over the course of a couple of hours this past Saturday evening and I admit that I may have shed one or two tears of relief and gratitude when it came. I grew up about one hour east of Lake Michigan which meant that we had lots of thunderstorms every summer. I developed a fondness for them and I hadn’t realized just how much I missed the sound of rain until this past weekend. There were a scary five minutes when nickel-sized hail fell – we know some farmers who have lost entire crops to hail in the past here – but luckily this mostly just damaged some of the larger-leaved veggies like winter and summer squash. I think they’ll be all right; the surface area of their leaves is so big that I doubt a few holes in them will have much impact on their growth.

Week 7: July 17, 2023

We are now officially halfway through the summer. It feels like I was just prepping the first bed for a spring crop of arugula and now I am seeding a second succession of crops for the fall. These next two weeks are when we usually have a bit of a slow down on the farm. We’ve more or less weeded everything and put the gardening tools that were littered all over the field back where they belong. We’ve started to catch up on the “if we can get to it” chores and we’re spending more time in the kitchen, making jams and freezing veggies for the winter. Soon our days will be filled with lots more harvesting as the crops that are ripening now require picking nearly every day. The storage cooler will be filled to the brim and we will have trouble deciding what to make for dinner because there will be so many options. But for now, we relax a little and catch our breaths.

Week 6: July 10, 2023

We’ve been spending more of our time lately out of the production field, working on other parts of our land, restoring pollinator habitat and knocking back invasive plant species that often outcompete the native plants that we’re trying to save. While at first glance this other work doesn’t appear to have much to do with farming, in my mind it’s instrumental to the type of agriculture we’re doing. Some call it “ecological farming.” To me, this means that we have to think about how all the parts of our land fit together and impact what we’re doing, not just what’s happening where the crops are growing. The question we ask is: how can we integrate biodiversity, soil regeneration, natural enemies of pests, and so on to ensure that we can produce healthy food and protect nature at the same time?

Week 5: July 3, 2023

Happy Independence Day! I knew July was coming, but honestly I didn’t expect it to arrive quite so soon. Living on the land means that nowadays I primarily mark the passage of time in summer according to what is blooming, which insects are showing up, and when things need to be harvested. For instance, now is the time to remove invasive wild parsnip from the prairie before it sets seed and multiplies. I saw my first Japanese beetle on some cabbage the other day, right on schedule, and the fireflies have been busy trying to find each other in the evening sky near our barn. The elderberry bushes are full of flowers and there are all sorts of bees everywhere. My favorites are the teeny tiny ones. They are out there foraging alongside the bigger honeybees and holding their own. I’ve always had a soft spot for the underdog. I saw this one pollinating a zucchini blossom early this morning. You go, little bees!