Newsletter 9-16-09
Our corn is ready, well after the summer picnic season but well ahead of the Harvest Moon. The same, I suppose, could be said of the salsa fixin’s we gave you last week. Both events are icons of this cool, wet year. Those events, and the rain I hear falling outside right now. (It’s Wednesday again.) We started to spread cover crops yesterday, and tomorrow we’ll plant our strawberries. The next day, our garlic. This is the first year we harvested corn at the same time we planted our over-wintering crops, another interesting symbol of this year.
In sadder news, we bid farewell to our tomatoes this week. The cool weather and the fungi associated with all this rain finally got the better of them, and they gave up. They sank into the ground in a mushy, pulpy mess and said: See ya next year. While we’re sad to see them go, we’re surprised that we had tomatoes at all this year. The whole year has been cold and wet – anathema to tomatoes – and our attitude all along has been: We’ll take what we can get.
As I said, we’ll get our strawberries and garlic into the ground this week. While those two items would make an incongruous salad, they are fall planted crops, enjoying a long fall of root development and an early spring of greening up. In another few weeks, we’ll plant some spinach. More evidence that farming is not a seasonal or annual phenomena, but a continuum that provides an illusion of yearly divisions.
All the same, we’re starting to think about next “year.” We keep tweaking the way the fields are arranged. More cilantro. More chard, less arugula. More peppers. The same amount of eggplant? Maybe a bit more. Should we give up on winter squash, and use that same space for something else? Like more sunflowers? Or will the deer get it all? The considerations that go into every crop we grow are: profitability, time consumed cultivating and harvesting, market gluts and shortages, and, perhaps most importantly, how it looks in the box. I’ve often thought someone could come up with an elaborate equation – like, one with fractions and slanty lines and xs and ys and all kinds of fancy Einstein symbols – that dictated the profitability of what we grow: The cost is this per linear foot, and the profit is this per linear foot, though it takes this much time to plant and this much time to weed. It costs this much to irrigate – well, you get the idea.
Yes, that is extreme. I used to think about what color everything was, and design the fields so they were giant mandalas. That was a bit extreme, too. That's where we live here at Let It Grow - somewhere between Einstein equations and giant mandalas.
Weed of the Week
I didn’t want to do this, but it seems as though I gave no choice. I offer this week horse weed, sometimes called giant ragweed, our friend Artemesia trifola. I don’t usually consider it to be a weed – it grows along roadside and in the rougher areas at the edges of the farm, but never becomes too much of a problem in the fields. We leave it along the road; the bees love it. It’s a great nectar/pollen crop in late summer. We leave some in the chicken coop. It grows tall and leafy and strong and provides a bit of shade for the chickens.
It can get up to fifteen feet tall if it gets plenty of water, and a six year old and gather a lot of it and make a teepee. Or a six year old of any age, for that matter.
Alas, though, I now consider it to be a weed. We’ve got it all over our field on Meadow Fork, growing in the potatoes and giving the corn a run for its money. It’s a new field over there, and we should get the horse weed under control in a year or two, when we’ll take away it’s weed designation. Whatever we call it, it has it’s place in the equation. Weed of the Week
I didn’t want to do this, but it seems as though I gave no choice. I offer this week horse weed, sometimes called giant ragweed, our friend Artemesia trifola. I don’t usually consider it to be a weed – it grows along roadside and in the rougher areas at the edges of the farm, but never becomes too much of a problem in the fields. We leave it along the road; the bees love it. It’s a great nectar/pollen crop in late summer. We leave some in the chicken coop. It grows tall and leafy and strong and provides a bit of shade for the chickens.
It can get up to fifteen feet tall if it gets plenty of water, and a six year old and gather a lot of it and make a teepee. Or a six year old of any age, for that matter.
Alas, though, I now consider it to be a weed. We’ve got it all over our field on Meadow Fork, growing in the potatoes and giving the corn a run for its money. It’s a new field over there, and we should get the horse weed under control in a year or two, when we’ll take away it’s weed designation. Whatever we call it, it has it’s place in the equation.
In the Box
Corn
Lettuce Mix
Peppers
Cute Baby Squash
Tomato
Chard
Malabar Spinach
Hakurei Turnips
Why is my corn decapitated?
Every year of organic sweet corn is guaranteed to come with a corn ear worm. The eggs are laid at the top of the ear, and when it hatches the larvae starts to eat down the ear. We’ve thoughtfully removed them all for you, with one swift cut.
In sadder news, we bid farewell to our tomatoes this week. The cool weather and the fungi associated with all this rain finally got the better of them, and they gave up. They sank into the ground in a mushy, pulpy mess and said: See ya next year. While we’re sad to see them go, we’re surprised that we had tomatoes at all this year. The whole year has been cold and wet – anathema to tomatoes – and our attitude all along has been: We’ll take what we can get.
As I said, we’ll get our strawberries and garlic into the ground this week. While those two items would make an incongruous salad, they are fall planted crops, enjoying a long fall of root development and an early spring of greening up. In another few weeks, we’ll plant some spinach. More evidence that farming is not a seasonal or annual phenomena, but a continuum that provides an illusion of yearly divisions.
All the same, we’re starting to think about next “year.” We keep tweaking the way the fields are arranged. More cilantro. More chard, less arugula. More peppers. The same amount of eggplant? Maybe a bit more. Should we give up on winter squash, and use that same space for something else? Like more sunflowers? Or will the deer get it all? The considerations that go into every crop we grow are: profitability, time consumed cultivating and harvesting, market gluts and shortages, and, perhaps most importantly, how it looks in the box. I’ve often thought someone could come up with an elaborate equation – like, one with fractions and slanty lines and xs and ys and all kinds of fancy Einstein symbols – that dictated the profitability of what we grow: The cost is this per linear foot, and the profit is this per linear foot, though it takes this much time to plant and this much time to weed. It costs this much to irrigate – well, you get the idea.
Yes, that is extreme. I used to think about what color everything was, and design the fields so they were giant mandalas. That was a bit extreme, too. That's where we live here at Let It Grow - somewhere between Einstein equations and giant mandalas.
Weed of the Week
I didn’t want to do this, but it seems as though I gave no choice. I offer this week horse weed, sometimes called giant ragweed, our friend Artemesia trifola. I don’t usually consider it to be a weed – it grows along roadside and in the rougher areas at the edges of the farm, but never becomes too much of a problem in the fields. We leave it along the road; the bees love it. It’s a great nectar/pollen crop in late summer. We leave some in the chicken coop. It grows tall and leafy and strong and provides a bit of shade for the chickens.
It can get up to fifteen feet tall if it gets plenty of water, and a six year old and gather a lot of it and make a teepee. Or a six year old of any age, for that matter.
Alas, though, I now consider it to be a weed. We’ve got it all over our field on Meadow Fork, growing in the potatoes and giving the corn a run for its money. It’s a new field over there, and we should get the horse weed under control in a year or two, when we’ll take away it’s weed designation. Whatever we call it, it has it’s place in the equation. Weed of the Week
I didn’t want to do this, but it seems as though I gave no choice. I offer this week horse weed, sometimes called giant ragweed, our friend Artemesia trifola. I don’t usually consider it to be a weed – it grows along roadside and in the rougher areas at the edges of the farm, but never becomes too much of a problem in the fields. We leave it along the road; the bees love it. It’s a great nectar/pollen crop in late summer. We leave some in the chicken coop. It grows tall and leafy and strong and provides a bit of shade for the chickens.
It can get up to fifteen feet tall if it gets plenty of water, and a six year old and gather a lot of it and make a teepee. Or a six year old of any age, for that matter.
Alas, though, I now consider it to be a weed. We’ve got it all over our field on Meadow Fork, growing in the potatoes and giving the corn a run for its money. It’s a new field over there, and we should get the horse weed under control in a year or two, when we’ll take away it’s weed designation. Whatever we call it, it has it’s place in the equation.
In the Box
Corn
Lettuce Mix
Peppers
Cute Baby Squash
Tomato
Chard
Malabar Spinach
Hakurei Turnips
Why is my corn decapitated?
Every year of organic sweet corn is guaranteed to come with a corn ear worm. The eggs are laid at the top of the ear, and when it hatches the larvae starts to eat down the ear. We’ve thoughtfully removed them all for you, with one swift cut.
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