Week 10 Newsletter

Week #10 - Week of August 10th

Happy Mid-CSA.  10 weeks in the books, 10 weeks to go.  What a great season it has been so far in the field and on the farm.   Crops are still booming, some are beginning to get “tired” and they are getting a jolt of fertility.  We do this a couple ways.  One is we sidedress plants.   This is when we go into the beds and put additional amendments – typically our custom blend, chicken pellets and sometimes alafalfa meal – next to the plants and scratch them into the surface.  This is the slowert form of re-amending the soil as it requires water, micro- and macrobiota to work together to bring the nutrients down to the root zone and convert them to a form that the plants can use.  If you see a deficiency, this form of application is already a bit late as there is a lag between application and uptake.  We normally do this on a schedule for the long season plants (tomatoes, cucumbers and summer squash) about once every month.   The plant gets an application of amendments in the beginning when we prep the beds.  One month in it receives a sidedress and two months in it can receive a second sidedress.  And that is typically good as not many plants go beyond 100 days.   The other way we do sidedressing is to add a liquid fertilizer.  This can be applied topically/foliarly or through a soil drench.  The plant can more readily take up this form of amendment.  Next week we will be taking the chard and kale in u-pick offline so that we can add foliar nutrients.  We will let them uptake this and then give a couple rinses to get any of the residue off of the leaves.   These are all common practices on farm to keep plants booming and as always, all of our amendments and fertilizers are certified organic and rather innocuous. 

Our tomato production is through the roof, so now if the time to get a bunch of tomatoes if you like preservation projects.  Enjoy hunting for the cucumbers in the U-pick.  There are A LOT there.  We’ll get back to introducing crew members via prose next week.   Have a wonderful week, enjoy the odd heat – kinda hot, kinda sticky – and don’t forget that the smoke brings plenty of problems, but it does keep us in that beautiful state of alpenglow all day long, so enjoy the positive impact it can have on painting the world in a beautiful light.  See you around.

-Alex