Farm Notes

One of the advantages of being a CSA farm is the flexibility that we have in putting together the boxes each week. When a farm is geared towards wholesale markets, it needs to meet the expectations of providing a consistent product throughout the growing season. For instance if you want to be the carrot supplier for a wholesale outlet, you want to be able to harvest a consistent quantity and size of carrots every week throughout the season. This sort of marketing favors large farms, and in fact, there are two huge producers that grow the majority of carrots consumed in the US (Grimway and Bolthouse Farms). As a diverse small farm, we can take some risks in trying new varieties, and we have the flexibility to constantly change what we are growing on any given part of the farm to try to stay ahead of pest and disease problems.

We had initially planned on Tokyo market turnips for your boxes this week, but they have a lot of pest damage, so we are subbing in “rainbow” carrots. (We’ll be able to salvage some of the turnips, so they’ll show up as an either/or with the radishes.) This crop of carrots have come in sooner and better than we had expected, except for one glitch. We bought seed for a rainbow carrot mix that has white, yellow, and light orange carrots, and thought we would try to expand the rainbow by mixing in additional seed from a red carrot variety. Unfortunately, the red variety didn’t germinate well, and they are taking much longer to mature. The other colors are ready to harvest, so we can’t wait for the red ones. We will try to leave the immature carrots to harvest later, but some will likely be pulled during harvest. At any rate, we are actually quite pleased with the other carrots in the mix. It may be a pale rainbow, but it is a tasty one!

On an unrelated note, we are seeing large flocks of blackbirds flying around the farm these days. Sometimes I’ll hear a whoosh, and look up to see them blow through and deposit a hundred birds on a tree in a few seconds. Our agave (century plant) stalk seems to provide a suitable landing spot. The phrase “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” keeps coming into my head.