What’s in your share:
Onions: Sierra Blanca (white), Walla Walla
Potatoes: Yukon
Watermelon: Sunshine (stripe - yellow), Starlight (stripe - red), New Orchid (stripe – orange), Mickey Lee (pale green - pink), Picnic (green oblong – red)
Pepper Sweet: Carmen, Gypsy, Islander
Pepper Hot: El Jefe Jalapeno, Serrano del Sol
Tomatoes: Paragon (red), Pink Beauty (pink), Taxi (yellow), Orange Blossom (orange),
Green Zebra (green), Austin
Collards: Georgia
Okra: Cajun Beauty
Herbs: Bouquet of Dill, Sage, variety or Basils, Garden flowers
Surprises: cucumbers, summer squash, eggplant, cantaloupe, honeydew melon
From the Farmers………
What glorious weather! Starting this week, we have shifted our farm day to begin at as it is so wet in the fields earlier. The goat still gets milked and other livestock fed at , but field work doesn’t begin until 9 – time to have another cup of coffee!
Even with the glorious weather and the continuing abundant harvest, it is a bittersweet time of year. Every week, our intern crew gets smaller as interns leave to return to college or go on to other ventures. This week, we bid goodbye and wish the best to Susie and Holly.
We had a couple of wonderful days at the Minnesota State Fair. Our excuses – if we really needed them – were that we took Holly to the airport on Friday morning and we figured as long as we were already in town, we’d go to the fair. We had a really good day eating and wandering through the Creative Activities building (getting ideas for knitting projects for winter), the Horticulture Building
Our excuse for this is that we have been looking for a new herd sire for our growing Saanen dairy herd. We think we found the perfect herd and will soon be making a trip to just north of St. Cloud to look at a couple of potential buck kids. We will do this soon as we want to have our does give birth and begin producing milk by the first of March. This means we will need to breed them by October 1. Gestation for goats is 145 days. We are pretty excited about the small dairy we will be beginning next spring.
The farm really looks like fall. Just today, we pulled out all the summer squash plants that have completely quit producing, and ripped up the plastic mulch. On Monday and Tuesday, we harvested all the rest of the onions and spread them out on shelves all along the sides of one of the big hoop houses to cure. It’s a LOT of onions! The sweet corn is also done and soon we’ll be fencing the sheep into that part of the field to graze on whatever is left of the corn. They have been grazing on the Ambrosia and Sugar Buns fields and have eaten everything including the weeds!
Our pigs continue to enjoy eating a lot of cracked cantaloupe and honeydews and watermelons. We know why our pork is the sweetest tasting around! And our broiler chicks are huge, ready for the freezer. The year is winding down………….
