June 25

Farm Notes

Considering that it’s late June in North Carolina, I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by how lovely the weather has been this week! (Mostly) clear skies, cool, and super low humidity… I know it’s too good to stick around, but I’ll take it while it lasts.

We’ve officially rounded out Week 2 of our Summer CSA, and the boxes have been filled with a rainbow of color. From new potatoes to beets, tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, zucchini, fresh herbs, etc… it’s an especially delicious time of year as we enjoy the both the late spring and all the early summer veggie goodness.

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I’ll be honest that I was a little worried going into our new CSA model about whether we’d have the abundance and diversity to fill our boxes each week… and as we get rolling into summer, I can say I’m relieved by how well things are working out. In general, farms using a CSA model need to design a careful crop plan to ensure enough diversity and well-timed successions of veggies to keep the boxes varied and abundant from week to week. But because I didn’t go into this season planning to do a CSA (we decided to make the shift after realizing that I would be 6-8 months pregnant through this summer, and the farmstand model was going to be too tough of a workload for me to handle) – our crop plan wasn’t exactly designed with a CSA in mind, but so far, so good!

That’s not to say that everything has gone perfectly… I think it’s important to also talk about some of the failures and things I know we can improve on for next season. For one thing, we’ve really struggled with pest pressure on our cucurbits (zucchini, cucumbers, winter squash, etc). Unfortunately, the pests (mostly vine borers and squash bugs) got too far ahead of me on our zucchini, and our whole crop (and attempts for a 2nd succession) are already basically finished for the season. I also wish that I had planned better successions for summer lettuces… we have more lettuces that will be ready to harvest soon, but next time I’ll have more regular plantings so we have a consistent supply through the summer.

How are YOUR gardens growing this season? I’d love to hear how things are going, and if you have any questions or need help trouble-shooting any issues, don’t hesitate to let me know! A reminder that our next Zoom Q&A session is this Sunday, June 27th @ 3pm-4pm EST! This is a great time for us to connect one on one and I’ll happily answer any questions you have around growing + cooking seasonal veggies. You can submit questions ahead of time HERE, and HERE is the Zoom link to join on Sunday.

Kitchen Notes

It feels like all of the sudden, there is an epic abundance of summer veggies that we get to cook with! Even though I don’t have much time/energy to cook these days, the nice thing about summer veggies like tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, etc is they are so fresh and delicious on their own that you don’t have to do much to make a nourishing and vibrant meal.

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