SM24 (W10): What Does it Take to Flip a Greenhouse?
Dear Farm Community -
Last week was another sweaty one 🥵 Temps continue to reach high into the 90’s almost daily, with heat indexes reaching even higher! The efforts being put forth by the farm team has been commendable. This past week despite the heat we managed to complete a greenhouse turnaround, relocating 7 beds of first-succession tomato plants into the compost heap (seeya when you’re dirt!). After a few days of hard work we have a beautifully planted greenhouse full of little baby cucumber plants, green onions, basil, and bok choy. What does “a few days of hard work” look like you may ask? See: un-stringing tomato plants, removing T-posts, pulling up tomato vine roots, dragging vines into the truck bed, pushing huge piles of vines into the compost heap, removing old irrigation, manually broad-forking each bed, shoveling hundreds of pounds of compost, calculating and spreading soil amendments, tilling each bed, avoiding (or more likely, failing to avoid) the angry fire ants unearthed from the freshly tilled soil, laying new irrigation, watering-in seedlings, spacing out the transplants, and finally finally putting our hands on those lil baby seedlings and tucking them into the soil. We wrapped up this transformation on Thursday morning with one last big push - the blazing sun heating up the greenhouse was plenty of motivation to move swiftly! Check out some pics of Thursday’s final steps of transformation below:
With a little time and love, these efforts will turn into your late-summer and early-fall cucumber salads, pestos, stir fry’s, and scallion pancakes !!
Speaking of early fall (if we dare to dream of cooler weather) …. our FALL CSA FULL SEASON SHARES are now on sale!!!!!!! Simplify your autumn and get 12 weeks of easy peasy local produce in one payment. By signing up for the full Fall season you also receive a discount, making this a better value than the weekly subscription. The Fall CSA session runs from September 3rd to November 23rd, giving you a beautiful variety of warm weather and cool weather crops. In the veggie shares you’ll still catch some weeks of summer goodies like tomatoes, peppers, and okra, and then see the seasons changing each week with sweet potatoes, greens, lettuce, and root veggies coming in later. Our flower shares will at first include end-of-summer favorites like sunflowers, Mexican sage, marigolds, and zinnias, and you’ll have lots of cool weather blooms later on to bless your bouquets! Bring on the Dahlias! We are also offering organic pasture-raised eggs from Smyly Farms as an add-on. Check out all the wonderful ways you can bring local agriculture into your life this fall:
But what crops are happening right NOW you ask? We’re starting to see BIG BIG FIG HARVESTS! Basil is also having a great summer with lush healthy plants providing seemingly endless harvests. While flower-land is hitting a mid-season lull with many of our plantings, we did bring an incredibly aromatic spread to markets this past weekend with marigolds, fresh eucalyptus, and dried lavender. Keep your eyes (and noses) on the lookout for these in the coming weeks!
Ok CSA crew — everybody gets figs this week! Sweet toothys can pick up a pint of ice cream to pair with their pint of figs and whip up a Roasted Fig Sundae (or grab some yummy ricotta for Ina Garten’s Fresh Fig and Ricotta Cake!) If you’re looking for a savory angle, use your CSA share’s powers combined to make this fig & tomato basil salad. There’s really sooooooo many incredible ways to transform figs in the kitchen. But you can always just enjoy them the way nature made ‘em, sweet and perfect on their own.
Happy Eating!!
Diamond Hill Farmers
we promise, we are out-standing in our field:
$25 share: microgreens, okra OR shishitos, winter squash, tomatoes, figs, basil
$35 share: microgreens, okra OR shishitos, winter squash, tomatoes, figs, basil, shelled peas, bell peppers