Turkey Hill CSA Newsletter – Week 6

Notes From the Farm

The farm has been busy with the transition from spring to summer. We are clearing out the old spring beds – spinach, carrots, beets & replanting some with fall onions, beets and more salad. Lots of tilling down weedy old beds, and lots of mowing with the tractor between the bed sections and around the edges of the fields. This a big job on the tractor, but also onvolves taking apart and then re-assembing a bunch of irrigation pipe.  Its all worth it though – besides making things look great, mowing  and tilling weedy areas are critical to controlling pest damage on the farm! The grasshoppers and rabbits love living in the tall grass sections and then chow on crops at the edge of the beds. We’ve had some damage this year in the carrots and the chard that was pretty bad. fortunately, once the pests habitat is gone they move out to the surrounding fields where the grass is still tall and they can hide from predators.

Speaking of predators, I’ve spotted the turkeys again recently, i saw a group this morning with four adults and 25 or more babies, of varying sizes. I hope they will start to make their sweeps through the field hunting bugs!

Also this week, the tomatoes in the hoop house got pruned and tied up. The hoophouse tomatoes will be our first of the season, but they are still weeks away. We did start picking artichokes this week – these are small size, thornless chokes called ‘Imperial Star’. The first harvest(s) are especially small, but the are great tasting and you can eat nearly the entire choke. There are NO hairs (yet) in the middle, so you can (after cooking well) just hold the leaf tips and eat off the entire bottom. I don’t have enough to give everyone a reasonable amount this week, so I’ll dole them out to some of you each week over the next few weeks.

The green onions in this week’s boxes are the last of our onion seedlings – these are basically baby onions! We’ll have more traditional scallions and possibly pearl onions in a few weeks. The main season onions are sizing up nicely, and a bunch of crops are just a few weeks away. Some boxes will also get spinach this week – this is the last of the spring spinach. We are topping the beets this week, they are all large sized and we’ll have beets for a week or two more.

More Notes:

Valentin and Lizzy are here and helping out tremendously already. If you pick up at the farm, please say hello if you see them hanging out in the harvest area. Also, CB/Gunnison delivery people – you’ll see Valentin and Lizzy on one of the upcoming delivery – July 26th – he will be interviewing a people for his CSA research – if you are there to meet the truck when we come!

I’ll try to snap more pictures in the next week and email them out. The field looks great, everything is growing nicely!

Questions and Answers