News from the Farm

HARVESTS AND A DELIVERY

The past few weeks have been spent covering the crops we planted for this fall with remay and the crops we planted for spring with 4 mil platic. Our intent was to keep these late planted crops healthy until harvest. It appears that we have succeeded with the plantings for fall harvest. You can get a sense of our efforts by checking the new images on the Farm Photos page.

We now have significant quantities of Arugula, Lettuce Mix, Mustard Mix and Mizuna that are ready for harvest. We also have Celeriac, Chinese Cabbage and quite a few small heads of Lettuce. Broccoli Raab and Hakurei Turnips are still immature.

This summer we rented three organically certified acres in Lancaster County and hired a young Amish farmer to plant and care for our potatoes, sweet potatoes, Brussels Sprouts, Leeks and Onions. All these crops had been intended for another local rented field and were reassigned to Lancaster County after we encountered problems in getting it ready for planting.

Because of the switch, these crops were planted late. The onions did not produce well and the Brussels Sprouts are still far from ready. However, we got a satisfactory harvest of potatoes and sweet potatoes. We now have good quantities of French Fingerlings and Yukon Gold potatoes in our walk-in coolers. We have smaller quantities of Banana Fingerlings and Kenebecs.

The produce in our fields and coolers will support at least one more week of deliveries and maybe two. Accordingly, we plan to resume deliveries starting next week. We will follow our usual route on Tuesday, November 14 and Thursday, November 16.

We do not have a sufficient variety of produce to support our usual ordering protocol, so we will deliver a farmer's choice box to everyone. We will try to send a mass email tomorrow and also attempt to send postcards to all subscribers.

I know that this delivery will not satisfy everyone, but feel that food is better than no food. Restarting abruptly like this will cause many problems and I might as well apologize for them in advace. All I can promise is that we will do the best we can to bring you some more food from our failed farm. Please check this page regularly for more announcements -- we may be able to bring off one more delivery before the cold weather shuts us down. We will contine our effort to plant crops which can overwinter and be harvested early in the spring to finish our last season.