Today’s share: chard, carrots, tomatoes, cucumber, summer squash, onions, and lettuce. Chard and tomatoes are the two crops that really stand out for me today. I love putting together the chard bunches and getting to see all of the subtle variations in the colors. It’s from farm saved seed, so that makes it special, too. The tomatoes are also a nice mix of colors and a couple of the varieties come from our own saved seed – the black slicer, which came from a volunteer plant in my garden; and the sauce tomato which I got seed for from David Yudkin years ago, and he had got it from Ulisse Edera who brought them to Portland from Northern Italy when he immigrated here many years ago. On this small a scale saving seed doesn’t really make sense, economically, but I do it for a few varieties because it allows us to grow something really special with a quality of seed we wouldn’t be able to buy anywhere else.
Sweet peppers are just on the cusp of being ready and we might have one per share on Thursday or next Monday. All of the other of the items in the share are suffering a bit and so are a bit smaller, or in smaller quantities than we’d ideally like. Partly that’s due to the heat waves, partly just to variations in the fields and a little to do with pest issues, and all of those things are connected in some ways. The nature of our diverse plantings for CSA is that some things do well, others less well and it’s hard to predict from year to year which will thrive and which will struggle. We try to even things out, and the diversity means that even if we aren’t completely successful, there’s always plenty of something.
In the field we took a little break from planting today to catch up on some cultivating out weeds. The weeds were likely encouraged a bit by the slight rain we got on Sunday but we managed to get through the worst of them today. Thursday we’ll be back to planting the fields, getting the last of the fall crops into the fields.
Cully Neighborhood Farm 