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Jim Notes
August 30, 2018
Hi loyal readers and customers, I’m usually in an upbeat mood when I write these notes, but today I’m feeling a little down and sober. So I hope you’ll indulge me, and I think you will, since most of you are probably old friends and longtime customers. It’s been a tough season here at the farm, and in fact the last couple years have been increasingly difficult for us. After 18 profitable years (which followed the first 25 lean years) we now find ourselves struggling to make a living. It’s ironic, considering that we were hoping to retire (gradually) one of these days. Several new challenges have arisen in recent years, and the other day we put everything on a chart so we could evaluate the importance of each challenge. We listed eight of them and then we looked at each crop to see which problems hurt which crop. Looking at this chart, right away it was obvious which problems are the worst. First, weather, as you might expect. 2018 has been our worst nightmare for weather. When it’s dry we can always put irrigation water on but when it rains all the time (over 11 inches in July!) there’s no protection from it. Constant wetness makes it hard to plant and transplant at the right times, which is crucial when you’re planting over 50 different crops, most of them many times through the year. Constant wetness also damages the health of plants, causing diseases which weaken or even kill many crops. It causes seeds to rot and fruits to blemish. Then there's extreme heat and cold at freakish times of year, 80s is February, 20s in April, which messes up the natural sequences of plant development. Next on the list is pests and diseases. In the past 6 or 8 years we’ve seen several entirely new pests and plant pathologies. Each of these harms specific crops and makes it much harder to grow them organically, not resorting to pesticides and fungicides. So risks have increased. Enough complaints for now. But next week I want to tell you about a few other problems, and one bright spot. So stay tuned. As a reward for your patience and sympathy, I’m gonna give you a secret word for your discount: it’s “pathology”! Isn’t that cheerful? See you Saturday. Jim AUGUST 23, 2018
Hi loyal readers, Hope you enjoyed your freestone peaches last week. Only one or two weeks left of the season. Happy to say, it’s been a long season, since it now starts in late June. That’s a dramatic change, and it’s thanks to breeding in recent years that has given us several varieties that ripen both much earlier and later than when we started marketing local peaches. Sad to see those peaches go, but now we’ll start focusing on apples. In fact this past week we had the first of the new crop of apples. It always starts with two varieties, Redfree and Gingergold, which we’ll have several more times, then it’s Honeycrisp and so many others. The apple harvest is underway and keeps going until the end of October. And apple cider soon starts in late September. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how this unusual weather is affecting us. It has been very unusually rainy. In the month of July, when we often have a drought, this year we had over 11 inches of rain, and we’ve had over four inches so far in August. Thanks to some great luck we did not have flooded fields, but when it’s cloudy so often and the soil is wet all the time it has bed effects on the crops. Plant diseases run rampant, especially on tomatoes. This doesn’t mean that we have no tomatoes, but we’re forced to discard a much larger percentage because of blemishes, spots etc. Still, the flavor of the ones I’ve been eating has been excellent, and I do consume huge numbers of tomatoes, my favorite food (kohlrabi being a close second). I especially recommend the heirloom varieties such as Brandywine and the yellow Valencia. But the standard hybrid tomatoes this year have had great flavor too, better than many past years. That’s cuz we’re always trying to perfect our balance of fertility in the tomato ground. The perfect mix of macronutrients and trace elements is the key, and it’s so difficult to achieve! But worth the effort if you’re a nut about tomato flavor as I am. Hope you enjoy some great tomato sandwiches this week. See you Saturday. Jim August 16, 2018
Dear readers, Thanks for checking in. I know I’ve been delinquent (lazy?) lately in my blogging, and to compensate I’m going to do a secret word this week, for your five percent discount! Wow! It’s “freestone”. Don’t tell anyone. I’m not done ranting about corn, but this week I feel the need to talk about peaches. (“Freestone”peaches.). Partly that’s because we are at the peak of the peach season, (about three weeks left), and partly because there’s a lot about peaches that many consumers don’t know. Forty years ago, when I started looking for peach orchards in our area, I learned about the peach “industry“. Turns out that because of large scale handling demands, most of the larger orchards pick peaches hard and green, so they can be run over machines to grade and clean them and then held for days or weeks in refrigeration or on trucks. That’s convenient for the handling system but it severely degrades eating quality, as you’ve probably noticed if you’ve tried a supermarket peach. Back then, it was a huge frustration that we could not get local peach growers to leave the peaches on the tree long enough to get ripe. Tree-ripe is the only way that they taste best, but shipping and handling in the large scale supermarket system cannot tolerate the fragility and perishability of a ripe peach. However, luckily for us, several years of looking resulted in finding a family orchard near us who were small enough and cared enough about quality that they agreed to leave peaches on the trees just for us. That was 35 years ago, the family name is Andrews, and since then we have become good friends and good customers of three generations of the family. The current operators are Chad and Amy Andrews, near Chambersburg, PA. We appreciate their peaches so much! Typically, they pick on a Thursday, we hold the peaches at outdoor temperature for a few hours, then we put them in the cooler and bring them to you on Saturday morning. So that’s how we get those tree-ripe peaches you see at our market. It’s risky for us and for Chad, but we really try to bring you peaches that are ready to eat, and there’s no supermarket I know of that will take the risk, or that care about the quality as much as we and the Andrews family care. On a normal Saturday we bring 40 or 50 boxes, and we know that if they’re ripe enough we certainly will have some percentage of overripe ones, which we either have to just discard, or offer to you at half price. We hope you enjoy these rare, sweet, delicious, juicy treats! See you Saturday with lots of peaches. Jim.
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Farm News8/24/18
Schools are starting, Labor Day is next week, I know that it feels like summer is over. The farm season has it's own rhythm, and in fact each farm will have it's own seasons. Here at New Morning Farm it is still summer. So how do we measure summer? We're still planting, watering, weeding, and harvesting all the summer crops: tomatoes, summer squash, cucumbers, beans, and sweet corn. We've still got peaches, plums, nectarines, and cantaloupe melons to enjoy from our neighbors. Our summer market, Tuesday, is just gearing up for it's biggest markets. At the same time, we see the shift towards fall, though it's not here yet. We're transplanting the last of the fall brassicas, lettuce, and other field greens. The potato and winter squash harvests are done and they are curing for storage. This week, we're harvesting the big carrot planting for the year. As we squeeze these milestones into our regular work schedule, we can start to say, "That's done for the year." It's a relief for sure. Other signs of the shifting season include the later sunrise, and the quiet dawn, no more dawn chorus from the birds. The geese are overhead every morning for their training flights, and the insects chirping whirring and buzzing has replaced the tree and marsh frogs. At market this week, look for fresh harvested orange carrots! We're really pleased so far with the harvest, and the flavor is all carrot with none of the bitterness you sometimes get from the supermarket. The cooler and cloudy days has meant trouble for many crops, but the lettuce is doing great. We'll have the full selection this week from butterheads to romaine. Hope to see you there, Jennifer 8/1/18
Well, we didn't quite get the weather we wanted for the garlic harvest. Instead of dry and sunny, we received cloudy with 8.6 inches of rain in 5 days! But the garlic was ready to go, and so the crew worked extra hard in the pouring rain and mud to pull in all into the barn. It's now hung to dry, with some extra fans for air movement. Incredibly it's looking okay, even good. Whew! We are so thankful the river was able to handle all this rain without flooding any of our fields. It was oh so close. 8.6" in a week is definitely on par with a hurricane or tropical storm for us. We do all we can to prepare and manage the risk from these in September and October, using the high ground for the late crops, protecting the soil with strong cover crops, limiting soil disturbance starting in August. A flood in July would be devastating for many of our summer plantings: beans, corn, summer squash, winter squash, tomatoes, celeriac, lettuce, and the list goes on. But there was no flood, this time. On the positive side, the broccoli, cabbage, and brussels sprouts transplants are loving this weather. They don't really appreciate our normal summer days with highs in the 90's. Last year we had some similar weather in regard to temperature, and had beautiful broccoli in September. At markets this week, look out for our own field grown tomatoes! They're quite late, but we are just getting in to our big harvests. We'll have both heirlooms and standard red field tomatoes. Do you have a favorite heirloom? Be Well, Jennifer 7/20/18
The summer is whirling along. Each week we're working through the cycles of our big summer crops, planning, harvesting, packing, selling, and planning to harvest again. Tomatoes are just beginning, along with raspberries. Beans and summer squash have been chugging along for more than 6 weeks already, and require several days of labor each. Corn rounds out the biggest crops we harvest fresh weekly. Along with the weekly cycles, we're gearing up for our annual garlic harvest this coming week. We're hoping for good weather to dig the approximately 27,500 garlic plants. We tackle this one as a team, with a big group out in the field pulling and bunching, and a second group in the barn hanging bunches for curing. We had a great cookout at the lake last week. Pretty nearly the whole crew gathered foods, and we had a wonderful evening grilling and sharing great food, perfect weather, swimming, kayaking and canoeing. It was good to have a moment to enjoy the summertime. We enjoy the summertime constantly, but usually we're trying to work really fast at the same time. At markets this week: Sweet Corn! If you've had our corn, you already know why we get so excited when it arrives. Sungolds have really come on, and we've plenty at all markets. The other tomatoes are not too far behind now. Our own raspberries will be available early on Sundays along with some okra. Hope to see you there, Jennifer RECIPE OF THE WEEK
Fresh Corn Salsa Prep Time 10 Mins Stand Time 15 Mins Yield Makes 6 servings (Serving size: 1/3 cup salsa) GRETCHEN ROBERTS July 2007 RECIPE BY HEALTH . This easy, fat-free summer salsa is great for serving with chips or on top of grilled chicken or fish. Ingredients
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Everything Starts as a Seed
Jim and Moie Crawford started organic farming in 1972, on rented land, with a little experience, and practically no money. Over the course of 40 years, New Morning Farm grew from a small operation, selling vegetables out of the back of a pick-up truck, to a farm of over 95 acres with several thriving markets in Washington, D.C.
