Photos from the past few weeks...

Fields of plenty!

Upcoming Food Preservation Workshop: get ready for abundance!

* What Can I Do with All These Tomatoes (or peppers or strawberries or ... )?

Food Preservation Workshop, Tuesday June 29th, 6pm - 9pm @ Artisan Church*
Cost $12.00

Judy Price, Cornell Cooperative Extension Food Preservation Expert,
will introduce you to preservation techniques to help you have the highest
quality, safest and most nutritious preserved food!

You will:

- Learn about how the science of food preservation works to keep food from
spoiling or becoming dangerous.
- See the different types of canning, freezing, drying equipment and how to best
use them with your produce.
- Receive preservation resources & links to additional food preservation
information.
- Have a chance to ask questions that you've always had about food preservation.

* Register Online Here: http://food101.eventbrite.com/
(Registration Deadline is June 22nd & Seating is limited)

Invite a Friend!

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Best,

Del Ippolito
delippolito@yahoo.com


* Artisan Church
1235 S. Clinton Ave
Rochester, NY 14620

almost!

Crazy times in vegetable land!

As the first harvest approaches here at the end of May, most of the spring veggies I've planned for our menu are a bit confused. Peas, spinach, radishes, arugula, and bok choi are all looking at eachother perplexed, saying "why is it so HOT?" Some of them are starting to "bolt"-- this means they want to flower instead of make leaves. We've already lost 600 bok choi. The spinach is getting pointy leaves, and the peas are tall & lanky. Flowering is what summer crops do best-- like peppers, squash, eggplants, tomatoes-- these fruits all come from flowers, we don't eat those leaves. But the timing is all off this year. These plants are just barely coming out of the greenhouse at this time. ( They're growing great though!) But I'm afraid we won't have as many greens this spring. And the mustard greens will be spicier!

Also, it hasn't rained for several weeks.
Beth & I have been irrigating around the clock. Many a "day off" has been spent pulling drip lines down rows, patching leaks, and turning on & off valves.
We've decided to try irrigating from the creek as an emergency measure. We bought a gas pump & over 1000 feet of 2" tubing, enough to take us upstream of the wastewater treatment plant to a clean tributary. We hope that it won't dry up on us soon. Luke & I dragged the line through shoulder-tall thickets of burdock, stinging nettle, wild raspberry vines, and across the creek to the fields, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes the whole way. I bought a good filter & pressure regulators to hook everything up right. Tomorrow we'll see if the old antique pump we got from a fellow farmer in Bristol will actually stay running enough to deliver much-needed moisture to our vegetables.

Well, it has been a pretty eventful spring, with cold snaps & this long hot spell-- and I hope to have plenty to distribute in the first few weeks of the CSA. Climate change sure makes things interesting. I haven't had more than 2 days off in the last month. If I wasn't absolutely passionate about what I'm doing, I'd say this job wasn't worth all the work it takes. But people need to eat. And vegetables need to be taken care of. And we need to learn & adapt as quickly as we can to these new challenges.

See you at distribution! Thanks to all the volunteers who've come out to help plant this month... we appreciate your help soooo much. Thank you thank you thank you.

Summer?

More plants go in the ground! All the onions of the season, plus scallions, leeks, spinach, broccoli, kohlrabi, cabbage, spinach, lettuce, more mixed greens, carrots, beets, wow! Now it can rain.Lots of helpers came out for the latest planting party-- thank you thank you thank you!
Beth learned to cultivate with our little Cub tractor-- cultivation is a special word for "weeding" but you usually use bigger equipment than a hoe. In this case, 4 "hoes" (sweeps) are mounted underneath the tractor, and Beth drives right over the cabbage row, scraping out all the weeds in between. She's a natural, and had less cabbage fatalities than my first attempt cultivating!
May 2nd, and we've hit mid-80's two days in a row. I've been sweating almost continually for the past 3 days. Dirt, diesel, and sweat-- the kind of mix that makes you embarrassed to check out at the grocery store at 9:30pm after a long day (buying ice cream!).
But of course the onion plants don't care what I smell like! And the tiny mustard seeds, settling themselves into the earth, waiting for this promised rain.

Snow!

A few days ago there was this beautiful blizzard in the morning. Big wintry snowflakes. You can see our garlic here is quite tall already. Tomorrow it might get close to 80 degrees again. Weird spring... who knows what the summer will be like!

Planting success!

Wednesday we planted hundreds of spring greens, broccoli, cabbages, and more. We had over 20 people come out & help throughout the day! We got 13 beds planted-- nearly 1/2 an acre!
Thanks to all who came out to lend a hand-- we really, really appreciated it, and your efforts will be rewarded in a month or so when we get to come back & harvest the abundant crop of veggies! Right now, though, the baby plants need all the love they can get.
We gave them all a big drink with our lines of drip irrigation.
Then we covered everything up with row cover-- it might frost the next two nights, and this blanket will keep them warm, as well as keep the flea beetles off them (they eat little holes in the leaves). "Rockbags" hold down the row cover.
Our rolling greenhouse tables are a big hit-- when plants in the greenhouse get ready to go out in the field, we put them on these tables which "harden them off" during the day, and we roll the tables back in at night.
Here's our onion plants, which just went in the ground yesterday!
Thanks to the crew of dedicated folks who came out on Sunday to put these onions in the ground, along with leeks, & scallions! The rain is watering them in nicely.