Where are the sweet potatoes?

Where are the sweet potatoes?

Some of you have been asking!  Although we did not grow sweet potatoes this year, we do have plans to put locally grown Certified Organic sweet potatoes in the shares.  As you may recall, this spring was extraordinarily rainy.  So rainy that we had a really hard time getting the ground prepared for crops.   We had to make some decisions about what we would actually plant in the limited space that we had.  We called up Caleb Englert of Englert Farms in Houston, Mississippi and asked that instead of buying sweet potato slips (or cuttings, which are what we plant) we could instead buy sweet potatoes from him in the fall.  And while we take pride in growing everything for the CSA ourselves on our farm, we thought this was a better solution than going without sweet potatoes all together.   Now it is fall and we will be picking up our sweet potatoes next Monday and they will be in the shares for the following two weeks.  We will not be selling sweet potatoes at market, as the Cooper Young Farmers Market does not allow resale.

This past week Meg and I took soil samples.  We divide the field into sections, and take about five slices of soil from each section, mixing them together to get a sort of average.  We also took a sample in the blueberry orchard, and each of three high tunnels for a grand total of nine soil samples.  These will be taken to Waypoint Analytical in Memphis.  The results will help us understand if and how our soil is changing over time, and how we should amend the soil for next season’s crops.

Since we are expecting rain later this week, Randy seeded the winter cover crop!  One advantage of the dry weather we’ve been having is that we had enough time to disk in all the summer crops and prepare the soil for a cover crop.   As long as it germinates well, we will have no bare ground this winter.

Full Shares

• kale
• rainbow and orange carrots
• red cabbage
• bok choy
• cauliflower (Wednesday only, Saturday will get Kohlrabi)
• broccoli

Small shares

• kale
• rainbow carrots
• red cabbage
• red radish
• cauliflower (Wednesday only, Saturday will get kohlrabi)
• broccoli (Wednesday only, Saturday will get kale)