We’ve reached the part of the season when Fern disappears from view completely when she ventures off the path and into the hay fields. Only the swishing of the grass marks her path and her forays are pretty short; it’s a tangled jungle in there! Timothy, orchard grass, June grass, and clover weave their stems into a dense stand, and pollen plumes loft into the air with each rustle. It’s time to mow and bale it up for winter feed!
We need three days of sun in a row to make dry feed hay, and we are anxiously waiting on a “weather window.” We snuck in our first field last week, and got the bales in the barn by the skin of our teeth ahead of a heavy rain. We’re hoping for a lower stress window next time, but we’ll take what we can get! When it arrives, we mow as many fields as we predict we can bale while the weather holds. Mowing is followed by two days of tedding to fluff the hay and help it dry. Finally, on day three, we rake the dry hay into long rows and chug along with the baler while the pickup crew loads it onto trailers for delivery or storage in our barns.
The crops are loving the current mix of sun and rain, and of course so are the weeds! That same sunny window that we’re waiting for on the hay front will be a welcome opportunity to get some cultivating done in the veggie fields. Wet soil doesn’t like to be disturbed, but given a few dry days we’ll head out to the field with aisle sweeps, basket weeders, tine weeder, and scuffle hoes to attack the carpet of green while the weeds are small. In the meantime, there’s plenty of greenhouse seeding, tomato trellising, harvesting, and carpentry projects to keep up busy while we wait for the weather to turn.
Cheers
Norah and the Sweetland Crew
Week 5 Harvest
| Crops | Half Pint | Brimming Basket | Veggie Monster |
| Beets | x | x | x |
| Asparagus | x | x | x |
| Garlic Scapes | x | x | x |
| Swiss Chard | x | x | x |
| Baby Kale | x | x | x |
| Spinach | x | x | x |
| Onions | x | x | |
| Kohlrabi | x | x | |
| Apples | x | ||
| Mesclun | x | ||
| Parsnips | |||
| Radishes | |||
| Lettuce | |||
| Tatsoi | |||
| Arugula | |||
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Farmers Choice Shares Includes items with x
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Free choice shares choose any 6(HP), 8(BB), or 10(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).