We made it through Mother’s Day! Mother’s Day week is always the busiest harvest week of the season at the farm – not only do we harvest the abundance of heavy springtime veggies, but add onto it twice as many flowers as a normal week on the farm. This year Mother’s Day week also coincided with a big harvest of winter squash, and a failure (and timely repair) of our walk-in cooler on the farm. This kept us extra busy but we made it through with no crops lost and not a single flower stem left uncut. Big thanks to our teams at the farm and at the farmers market for making it all run like a breeze. And shoutout to everyone who got a bunch or three of flowers this week for your loved one – every flower bunch we bundled up this past week made its way into someone’s home, sure to spread love and joy and gratitude. Extra points go to anyone who cooked their mom, partner or anyone a home-cooked meal with organic veggies for the holiday!
With all of that said, Mother’s Day week, for us, usually feels like the climax of the farm season. With just three more harvests to bring in this year, the end of fresh veggies and flowers is fast approaching. We have two goals – keep the bountiful harvest rolling in for the rest of the month, meanwhile, begin turning it all in. Our days that are not spent harvesting over the next several weeks will be spent pulling out spent crops and beginning to work the soil in preparation for the summer fallow period when we plant cover crops to hold the soil in place and add vital nutrition for the farm season to come.
Crops that are abundant and delicious over the next several weeks include hot and sweet peppers, eggplant, butternut squash, cucumbers, summer squash, cherry tomatoes, beans, scallions, lettuce, basil, and slicing and heirloom tomatoes (come early to the market for the slicing and heirloom tomatoes because our supply is getting less now each week). Flowers in abundance are: sunflowers, marigolds (new this week), zinnias, cosmos, gomphrena, and celosia (gomphrena and celosia lend themselves well to drying if you would like to save yourself some everlasting beauty for the summertime).
The new rosemary patch we planted this year is well established now, so we expect to be bringing lots of it to the market these last three weeks (also dries well for summer, along with basil).
We hope to see you this weekend at the farmers market. Let’s enjoy the end of harvest season together!
Sincerely,
Ellen and Cole
