Yesterday we went out to mow our buckwheat cover crop, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The densely planted crop is up to my waist, and is blanketed with tiny white flowers. The stems and leaves are succulent and full of organic matter and nutrients, which we’ll mow and disc into the fields to feed the billions of microorganisms living in our soil. But at the moment, the flowers are feeding another local population; insects. As I stood for a minute in the sun and breeze watching, I counted at least 6 different species happily zipping and buzzing and droning from flower to flower. Honey and bumble bees were accompanied by several small species of native bees, wasps, and flies that I have only begun to learn to identify, like syrphid flies and sweat bees. I saw the elongated body of something that looked like a wasp and the fluttering wings of a small butterfly. The patch was alive.
The buckwheat seed was generously given to us this spring by my friend Laura, who is conducting a study at UVM about how farmers can support pollinators by using diverse flowering cover crops. Throughout the season, as beds come out of production or await a summer veggie crop, we sow cover crop seed in a dense broadcast to suppress weeds from germinating and build the structure of our soil. This, in turn, feeds the vegetable crops that will later grow in these beds. There are many options for cover crop species, but it’s easy to get stuck in a rut and gravitate to the tried-and-true biomass builders like oats and winter rye. While these “workhorse” species do an excellent job of holding onto nutrients and bulking up the soil structure, neither has flowers. Laura and her team are encouraging sequential summer plantings of buckwheat, to see if farms can provide floral resources to pollinators all season long. We’re excited to be part of this endeavor, and it will be interesting to see how this year’s planting affects the native pollinator population in our orchard, where researchers from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies have a monitoring station set up. With pollinator populations at risk across the country, I love that Sweetland can be a bit of an oasis. So we’ll leave the buckwheat alone until the next succession starts to bloom!
Cheers
Norah and the Sweetland Crew
Week 15 Harvest
| Crops | Half Pint | Brimming Basket | Veggie Monster |
| Cucumbers | x | x | x |
| Summer squash | x | x | x |
| Fennel | x | x | x |
| Eggplant | x | x | x |
| Sweet peppers | x | x | x |
| Lettuce | x | x | x |
| Tomatoes | x | x | x |
| Arugula | x | x | |
| Scallions | x | x | |
| Onions | x | ||
| Carrots | x | ||
| Kale | |||
| New potatoes | |||
| Spaghetti squash | |||
| Cherry tomatoes | |||
| Hakurei turnips | |||
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Farmers Choice Shares Includes items with x
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Free choice shares choose any 7(HP), 9(BB), or 11(VM)
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What’s Cooking This Week
You can find ingredients for all of these recipes in our farm store! We source meats, dairy, grains, beans, sweets, and more from local and sustainable producers. Don’t forget to use your CSA member discount by entering your account phone number in our POS (member discounts are automatically applied to LocalLine purchases for off-farm delivery). Have a recipe you’ve been loving? Share it with us and we’ll feature it here!