More yellow squash and zucchini? You may be feeling overwhelmed by the squashes pouring in but that is the bounty the garden has given us this year! It is all part of eating with the seasons. Sometimes, there is just an awful lot of zucchini. We are coming up on nightshade season, soon tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and eggplant will dominate the weekly share box. We might yet squeeze out another week of carrots, but our cool-weather-loving spring crops have pretty much cleared out. And speaking of potatoes … we have about 2000 row feet of potatoes ready to dig. That’s over a third of a mile. We’d love an extra set of hands or two, or ten, whatever.
Out in the field, the onion harvest is complete. Over the weekend our friend and CSA member Mike Moody came out and helped me harvest all of the red onions. We hauled out 28 full harvest baskets! They are now laid out on tables in the greenhouse to cure. The red onions cure more successfully than the yellow onions, which is why we distribute the yellow onions first while they are fresh, and the red onions later after they are cured. I know that our CSA members would prefer we alternate red and yellow, but last year we tried to cure both and ended up losing about a third of our yellow onions to rot.
Onion harvest was slightly complicated by the grass and other weeds we had to search through. Until a few weeks ago I swear the spring garden was free of weeds. Although I know it isn’t the case, it seems like they have grown up overnight. The thorny pigweed in the carrot bed is as tall as I am. It came out of nowhere! Digging carrots is a real adventure now. I like to say that June is the month where we turn around after all that planting in April and May to find that the weeds have taken over the garden. Our weed control gets better every year, but that is unfortunately still very true! Luckily for me, hand weeding is actually one of my favorite jobs on the farm.
The BIG NEWS on the farm is that our house is going up. You may already know this since Randy let the cat out of the bag on Facebook. After living in our lovely “vintage” single-wide mobile home for the past seven years, we are thrilled to finally be building. We are only two years behind our three-to-five-year goal. Randy maintains the goal was five-to-ten but that’s not how I remember it. Still, it would not be possible without the significant financial contributions from family members who don’t want to see their grandbaby raised in an appalling shack. It is a custom build that Randy drew the plans for. Even though we tried to do as much planning as possible in the off season, the build is still taking a fair amount of Randy’s time to make sure everything is just the way we want it. I am looking forward to so much, like having a space we can actually heat and cool, a bedroom door, a kitchen that Randy and I can work in together, a toilet that I am not afraid will fall through the floor every time I take a seat.
