onion party a success!

We had lots of folks come out last night to help us clean up & bag all the onions drying in the greenhouse... and after 2 hours we had successfully processed 1000 pounds of them! Then we enjoyed some local wine & fresh salsa. The sun set and the stars came out & we sat out by the 3-sisters garden watching the shooting stars & contemplating the milky way.
This photo shows that some of the onions are making a last attempt at life, sending up flower stalks with bright white clusters of buds. Merciless, we cut off their heads.

600 eggplants... and that's just for tuesday!

For today's eggplant harvest, we brought a giant bin to the edge of the field with the forks on the tractor, and had one person standing at it, catching, as we all picked and tossed. A great sport, eggplant tossing. These plants are out of control though...
Dave says this is probably the best eggplant harvest he's ever seen.
Sometimes the eggplants get these little "noses" for some reason that make for some humorous moments in the field...
We sure have a lot of eggplants. I love eggplant.
Hopefully our members love it just as much... we're giving out 5 each on tuesday!
Oh yeah, and there's all that other stuff we have to harvest as well... here's us washing beets:
Some cherry tomatoes we picked for tuesday... not too many on the vines still, but we were able to give a few out at least:
And swiss chard looking beautiful as ever:
Oh, and have I raved about purple cauliflower yet? I only grew about 15 plants, just as a personal experiment, but I think I'll grow a lot more next year... they are a color you just don't find enough of in your food. And the best thing is, they get even more purple as you cook them! Really good with a creamy cheesy sauce. Mmmm...

weeding and wining

With all the harvesting we're doing lately, we barely have enough time to squeeze planting into the week, let alone weeding.

So we decided to throw an evening "weeding party" for members... basically invite anyone out who wants to lend a hand (during the cooler hours of the evening), and then afterwards we provide wine and snacks & have a chance to socialize. It was pretty successful-- we weeded the entire pepper field & tomato field!


Wine was provided by Millbrook Winery, a local vineyard, and I made a sunflower-seed-dill dip for slices of peppers, carrots, and fennel. And of course there was melon too. A good time was had by all!

We plan to have more of these "weeding & wining" events-- next week will be an onion clean-up party. I really like the idea of combining a little bit of evening work with a little bit of evening fun, and it's nice to get to know our members more.

food avalanche

We picked and picked and picked and still there is more in the fields ready to bring in. It is easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of work to be done this time of year on a farm, and with only 3 of us full-time. But I will try to focus on the amazing shares we are giving out to each of our hundred or so members this saturday...

Crisp, licorice-scented fennel bulbs (2 each):
Sweet juicy cantelopes (2 each):
2 heads of lettuce, one head of garlic, 2 sweet onions, one cucumber or cabbage:
2 peppers, 1 bunch of carrots, 1 lb of "romanette" beans, 2 zucchini or summer squash, 1 bunch of cilantro, 1 bunch of scallions, 1 lb beets or rainbow chard, 2 red ripe tomatoes:
3 eggplants:
And 1 watermelon.

Plus pick-your-own dill, flowers, and more beans.

potatoes and tomatillos

Most of the potato field has died. But not to fear! The top of the plant dies, because it has finished it's life cycle (ok, sped up by leafhoppers) -- but lots of plump starchy tubers lie under the ground waiting for us to harvest them. Some rows are still alive-- the Adirondack Blue & Reds. And of course there are lots of weeds still alive. So Saturday morning we took the chisel plow (one shovel unattached) down the rows, straddling the potato hills, to loosen up all those huge weeds before they have a chance to go to seed. After that, we took the regular potato-hiller (on the Cub tractor) down the rows, scraping away all that was left of weeds, without exposing any potatos yet! Now we have bought ourselves some time, so we can harvest at our leisure-- those tubers can stay in the ground for a while. So many other things to harvest!

This is the row I planted with different varieties for the Cornell trial. You can see how some varieties have totally kicked it, and some varieties are still green & growing (that lush one is "Prince Harry" which has tiny hairs on its leaves which make it resistant to pests):
And I couldn't resist digging up a few for dinner:
And looks like tomatillos will be ready soon, as well as more & more tomatoes:
Bring on the salsa!

And our sweet potatoes are slowly spreading out their vines:
Beautiful plants.

10 weeks old

Here's some photos of the 2nd batch of chicks, hatched about 10 weeks ago. They are like little "mini" chickens. It will be fun to figure out what breeds they are.

(finally)

A quiet restful weekend on the farm.

...picked blueberries at Greig Farm in Tivoli
Sunday morning was really foggy and cool......morning glories blooming
...a bin of leftover watermelons.
This cooler weather is perfect for working in- I hope it stays through the week, as we have huge harvests to pull in from the fields.