Hello everybody, I hope you all are doing well.  I’m terrible sorry I missed the newsletter last week.  My work computer as well as my wallet and other personal things were stolen Wednesday night.  I’ve spent the last several days trying to sort my personal life out as well as keep the farm going.  The field is looking pretty good, though it would be nice if we could dry out some.  I have lots of plants that have been waiting to go in for a few weeks now.  Hopefully this weekend I’ll have a chance to get them in.

The strawberries are starting to ripen; I picked some pints this morning.  Probably will only be a small amount in shares this week but I’m hoping to get a few solid weeks again this year.  Spring shares are a tad lighter since the growing season is still getting going but lots more variety this week and moving forward.

I’ll make sure to get a newsletter out this week (in time).  If you have any questions please contact rtempel@caastlc.org.  Randy is back full time now and will be handling the CSA pickup queries.

Items in Last Weeks Share:

Lettuce Mix/Salad Mix

Kale

Red Pac Choi

Mustard Greens

Turnips

Radishes

Cilantro

Scallions

I’ve been thinking I’d like to brush the dust off this old blog and start to make some more use out of it.  Other than posting the weekly newsletter and visiting with the members who pick up at the farm, I don’t get to communicate with our subscribers or other people in general about the goings on of the farm.  This will also give my family and friends an opportunity to see what I’m up to.  My goal here is to give more anecdotal, slice-of-life stories and happenings up at Seeds of Hope so you can get a sense of what life is like as a (sub)urban farmer.  Of course it wouldn’t be a farming blog without filling you in on what I’m eating, after all it IS eating season, right?  I’m planning to update regularly but I have no idea what regularly means, so we’ll just see how it goes.  Hope you enjoy.

After a few sunup to sundown days I had gotten the first planting of the warm season plants in:  tomatoes, cucurbits, peppers, and some late-June bok choy’s, lettuces and napa cabbages; and managed to get the weekly harvest in.  I think I’m the last farmer in the Midwest to plant my tomatoes every year but with a frost advisory the second week of May I finally wasn’t the nervous one.  On Tuesday morning I was wearing an extra layer under my pants and a jacket while I was planting four beds of summer squash, zucchini, and cucumbers carefully into the woven, black landscape fabric I use as a mulch.  The planting didn’t take more than an hour, but the prepwork and post-planting regime took considerably more time.  The beds were worked the previous day and I had laid out the new landscape fabric and stapled it in place with 8 inch sod staples every three steps or so for ninety feet – the length of my beds.  Under the fabric I had ran a line of drip tape for irrigation off a fifty pound spool I’ve been lugging around from bed to bed.  I form a makeshift toilet paper dispenser of sorts so I can easily take the end of the tape and run it down to the end of the bed and tie it off.

Just after dawn I marked off my holes with green spray paint every three feet on the new fabric and lit the blow torch to get the end hot.  It’s a simple device that I also use as a flame weeder.  I let the flame blow for a few minutes to get the end hot then shut off the gas valve.  Picking up the propane tank I hustle up the bed burning holes where the spray painted circles are and where the plants will be, careful to avoid the drip tape which I can’t see and hopefully pushed far enough to the side so I don’t burn it too.  Every twenty or so holes I have to stop and relight the torch because as I press the hot metal onto the fabric to burn a hole, the end of the torch sinks a little into the loose soil causing it to cool down, so the faster I move the more holes I can burn before I have to relight it.  The purpose is to burn a big enough hole to get the plant in the soil underneath, while the rest of the solid fabric keeps weeds from growing and regulates moisture in the soil.

Anyway, the plants were in and the row cover was on, and here we are two days later on Thursday afternoon just after lunch.  We had a few brief showers that morning but now the sun had come out and we were up to just over 80 degrees and humid.  I was walking out to the caterpillar tunnel to ready a bed for cherry tomatoes which I was hoping to get in a few days ago but didn’t have enough light.  On a whim I decided to peak under the row cover at the cucumbers since I had noticed a few aphids on the underside leaves when I was transplanting.  As soon as I lifted up the row cover heat poured out on my face and I saw those baby plants laying down struggling for life; my plans for the day changed.  All the cucurbits, better known as squashes, were completely dehydrated, laying wilted on the hot, black fabric.  All of the water from their cell walls had been rushed to their roots to maintain vital functions in a last ditch effort to stay alive.  I couldn’t believe it.  They had been watered in two days ago and it showered on and off all morning.  I love growing with row cover, the benefits are many, but you can’t see your plants and you’ve got to remember that.  I scurried down the beds ripping up the staples and throwing off the row cover in a fit of  managed panic – a familiar feeling – and carefully laid the fabric between the beds so as not to damage the tender, flaccid plants.  Right now I keep my hydrant off if I’m not using it because of a leaky manifold (‘nother story) so I ran to it and pulled the handle up.  The manifold which I run three hoses from luckily sits right near the squash beds and I just so happened to have a 100 foot hose equipped with a watering wand on it, so I grabbed it up and started carefully watering the dying plants thinking up contingency plans if I lost the crop.  The plants were four weeks old; so, squash, zuchinni and cucumbers four weeks late at best if I started more today.  I’d need to figure out how to fill that gap in my CSA boxes in five or six weeks when I would start harvesting, and I’d have to make a decision quickly.

 

About halfway through watering a lovely woman and her daughter walked over and inquired about the farm.  I tried real hard for a second or two to explain our program and what we do but ended up motioning emphatically to my dying plants I had just planted two days earlier.  She understood and they took off to another section of the farm while I finished up watering.  About fifty feet away a shaky plastic shed that’s fallen down three times houses several large pieces of woven shade cloth – and no telling what else.  I’m not sure how many pieces of it I’ve got, four or five, or what lengths or widths they are, but I know about how much bed space I can cover with them, somehow, so I grabbed one and kind of bear hugged it and started dragging it to the beds, trying to figure out how wide it was.  I got it on and it covered all four beds for about 60 feet, so I tightly sandbagged the ends to keep the slack from laying on the plants and ran around picking up sandbags weighing other things down. I ran them to the squash beds three or four at a time and placed one at each wire hoop to keep the side of the cloth from blowing on the plants (the wire hoops are placed every ten feet or so and form a skeleton which supports the row cover or shade cloth).  By then the woman and her daughter had made it back around to me and I saw a big, thick cloud start to cover the sun – this would give the plants I hadn’t covered yet a enough of a break while I spoke with the woman and her daughter, which I did, then I hurried and covered the rest of the plants.  I kept a close eye on those little guys through the cloth and over the next few hours they started standing back up and I felt a little more confident.

Another twenty minutes and those plants probably would have been dead.  I’da gone to check on them the next morning (maybe) and they’da been all shriveled up and yellow and I woulda wondered what the heck happened.  But they weren’t dead – just close – and I wasn’t even headed over there to check on ‘em.  Just got lucky I suppose.  Funny thing about it is I got the shade cloth on about 2 o’clock knowing the whole time I was going have to take it off again (and put the row cover back on) before I left around dusk because we were expecting storms and I was afraid the wind would blow the cloth off all over the plants and cause a lot of damage.  And if I left the row cover off during the storms the wind would batter the plants since they were young and in pretty bad shape.

What was all that, then – diligence or luck?  Sometimes I can’t tell.  Sometimes you have to build a wall all day just to tear it down before night sets in– such is life.

 

Rain Gauge

 

What I’m Eating

My work is very physical right now to say the least, so I’m adding a lot of eggs to my diet for energy and muscle repair.  I’m a passionate localvore so I always seek out eggs from farms I’m familiar with.  Anyways, this past week I’ve been eating  spaghetti with garbanzo bean sauce.  It sounds fancier than it is.  It isn’t life-changing but it’s very hearty and tastes better after it’s been in the fridge; good qualities for long days.  I very loosely followed this recipe.  To the noodles and sauce I added ground pork sausage which was browned with onions and garlic, sunflower seeds, arugula, and of course a couple of fried eggs with scallions.  Mushrooms would have been nice too if I could just remember to buy them.   A nice spring mix is obligatory, of course.  Til next time.

Hello everybody, thanks for visiting our site.  As we all know we’re living in unprecedented times.  Things have changed for everybody and every organization on the planet and CAASTLC and Seeds of Hope are no different.  Fortunately, we are still offering our CSA program and are currently full.  We do from time to time have spots open up during the season, so if you’re still interested in signing up the best way to do this is go ahead and fill out the application (located a few posts below) and you will be placed on a waiting list.  Our organization is working with reduced staffing at the moment so we do appreciate your patience.  We’ve had to reorganize on the fly, people have had to learn new jobs, and we have a lot of work to do still.  Unfortunately we are currently unable to have volunteers at the farm currently.  This also means our volunteer-for-a-share program is on hold until further notice.  I hope to provide more clarity regarding this very soon as I know this is a popular thing we do, but I can’t comment any further right now.  We are also unable to accept EBT at the moment.  We are trying to resolve this issue because it’s highly important to us and integral to the program, but things are generally taking more time to do as all organizations including governments are scrambling a bit to deal with staffing issues, uncertainty, and often a vast increase in demands for services.  We will update you as soon as we know more on this front.

The plants, sun, and weather, however haven’t taken a break!  Our field is looking very good and with warm weather on the way the plants are going to start jumping rapidly.  Our full CSA season will start on May 21.  Emails have been sent to our subscribers regarding our pickup process at both farm sites.  We will send another email early next week confirming the process again to the full CSA subscriborship.  As of right now we are still asking that if you are picking up at the office in Overland that you call Brenden at 314-475-0553 to schedule a 30 minute pickup window on Thursdays from 1-6, though we would prefer our customers pick up by 5 if at all possible.  If you have any issues regarding your pickup please email Jake at jsmith@caastlc.org and we will figure something out.  Pickup at the farm will be similar to how it’s been in the past, though it will be contactless so just give me a honk when you arrive so I can throw my hoe down and grab your veggies from the cooler.  Just pop your trunk and I’ll run them out to you.

Thank you very much for your patience during this trying time.  We’ve been very busy juggling running the farm and handling our distribution and communication systems and have had a few lapses and been a bit late on our updates.  Rest assured we’re working the kinks out of our procedures while still keeping an eye on the plants.  That’s all for now.  I’ll be writing a facebook post with pictures on a walk around the farm I did this morning so be sure to check that out.  If I have time I will try to cross post on this site.  Take care.

Farmer Jake