Just like that – now it is May. Our final month of harvesting for the year. With the warmth of springtime leading into summertime, this month we will experience a final bountiful harvest of vegetables as the plants in the fields continue to spring forth in abundance. A final exhale after a long season seems to permeate the air as plants rush to ripen their last fruits, as greens begin to fade or bolt, and flowers bloom in profusion as the days continue to get longer and hotter.
We do our best to keep up. We began this week by harvesting the first winter squashes of the year. Butternut and acorn squash will be available from us beginning this weekend. We are also beginning to harvest some roots for long-term storage like daikon radish, beets and carrots. These can be stored at near-freezing temperatures for a few months. These will feed us on the farm for a while into the off-season, and supply some of our wholesale customers for a couple of weeks into our off-season. Don’t forget you can cut the tops off of root crops and store them in a sealed bag or Tupperware in the fridge to achieve extended storage for up to a couple of months. Start thinking about summer storage now!
The first week of May is always one of our busiest weeks of the entire season – not only are we overflowing with thousands of pounds of sweet peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, squashes, and cucumbers to harvest – but it marks the arrival of our favorite holiday of the year – Mother’s Day! Not only do we love getting to celebrate this day with our moms, but also spreading love far and wide with our farm flowers. With this celebratory weekend falling at such an abundant time of the season, we always seize the opportunity to plant as many flowers as we can possibly handle (and maybe even more than we can handle, honestly). We have learned people love gifting their mommas and loved ones a fleeting piece of the natural world, and we have felt more excited each year to fill that need for fresh, local, 100% organic flowers – safe for the sniffing and truly unique.
So while last week’s main newsletter takeaway was “come to the market!” to soak up the bounty of early summer – this week’s message remains the same, with the added bonus of flowers like crazy. Our fields are full of rows and rows of sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos, and so much more – blooming perfectly on time for the weekend.
We are sharpening our snips and getting ready to spread so much love into the world.
A note on Mother’s Day bouquets: In addition to our single-variety flower bunches, we have become known for our big, luscious mixed bouquets we make up each year for Mother’s Day. Many people have been messaging us this week inquiring about availability this weekend. We must report – we will not have mixed bouquets this year due to market/drive-thru logistics challenges this season. But have no fear – we are stocked, potentially more than ever before, with our single-variety bunches of incredible variety! We are recommending people utilize our flower “three-fer” deal (3 bunches of flowers for $22) to purchase three big bunches (or six! or nine!) of your mom’s favorite colors and flowers and make her a big bouquet from them. This option is available at the farmer’s market like every week. We recommend perusing the market this Saturday and finding the perfect flowers for your weekend.
Flowers available Saturday – SUNFLOWERS!, zinnias, cosmos, coreopsis, monarda, paper-moon scabiosa pods, gomphrena, celosia, maybe some marigolds if they bloom in time.
Sincerely,
Ellen and Cole
