We hope you’re ready! This Saturday, August 24th is our wonderful Coffee On The Farm event. We will have coffee, hay rides, dog pets, and farm tours from 10am-12pm. This is a great event for all, so bring your friends, family, neighbors, or make it a solo outing. We hope to see all of your smiling faces.

Last week was focused on emptying out some more rows and fields, and dusting off all the washing equipment that hasn’t been used since January when we washed the last of the 2023 carrots. 

We spent a muddy and rainy afternoon pulling the rest of the Spring/Summer beets out of the field. Seems that every time we do a big harvest of beets, it’s muddy and wet. Thank goodness for outside hoses so we can set up the “human car wash” and hose ourselves off before moving onto the next activity. We had been harvesting beets as needed which allowed the smaller beets to keep getting bigger, and it allowed us to send you the delicious tops along with the beets. It was time to pull the rest of the beets because even the small ones had sized up nicely. Restaurants like Duluth Grill and Ursa Minor will be very excited to receive such big beets that take less time and are easier to process than a handful of smaller beets. On days when we do big beet harvests, we take all the tops off while we are in the field. The tops will get tilled into the soil to add back organic matter to make the field even better the next time we use it. The beets get put into buckets and loaded on a trailer to be brought down to the packing shed. Outside the packing shed, we have our washing station set up. The buckets get dumped into our brush washer where a series of sprayer nozzles and brushes clean all the dirt off of the beets. They pop out the other side where we sort out any odd beets, and give them a final spray to get off any remaining dirt. Once the beets are all approved, they ride the roller table, which is a series of rollers that push the beets along. Eventually they drop into a pallet box where they will stay until they get packed up for CSA or retail orders. We filled one pallet box with the remaining spring/Summer beets which is estimated to be around 1,000 pounds of beets.

We spent a few days last week across the road, starting to get the first two plantings of outdoor carrots out of the ground. Normally at this time in the year, we would just be removing the first outdoor planting, but disease has hit these carrots pretty hard, so it’s best to get them out sooner rather than later in an attempt to save some of the crop. Our carrots have gotten a disease known as Aster Yellows. A bug called a Leaf Hopper carries this disease. The Leaf Hopper gets the disease when it feeds on an infected plant, then spreads the disease when it starts feeding on a healthy plant. Once a plant is infected, there is no cure, so the only option is to remove the crops or plants before the disease gets worse. We knew the carrots had this because 1) when you touch the carrot tops, hundreds of Leaf Hoppers jump and fly around. 2) from afar, you can tell because it causes the carrot tops to turn a yellow color, and some even get purple and red tops. The really infected carrots will start getting “hairy” this is where they begin to grow extra roots out of the carrot. Once the carrots get hairy, they will also take on a bitter taste. 

The first planting required lots of hand sorting to find the healthy carrots. We left quite a few carrots in the field, but we were still able to harvest and keep around 1500 pounds of carrots. That’s a lot of carrots, but a far cry from the 6,000 pounds that we should have harvested. The second planting looks a bit healthier, but is still pretty young, so get ready to receive some “baby” carrots in your shares. 

The annoying thing about Aster Yellows and Leaf hoppers is that they are not exclusive to carrots. Leaf Hoppers can infect a long list of plants including house plants, flowers, and other vegetables. We struggled earlier with asters yellow on some lettuce in a few of our greenhouses. The insects cause the leaves to turn a yellowish green color, and it tastes bitter. We had to do the same thing as with the carrots where we harvested and kept what we could, and the infected lettuce went to our chickens as an unexpected treat. Thankfully, lettuce grows really quickly, so we got a new planting seeded right away, and our chickens were very happy.

We’ve also found other diseases in our broccoli, outdoor tomatoes, the first planting of potatoes (not the big planting thank goodness), zucchini, and cucumbers. The good thing is, most of these diseases are “normal” for us, so we’ve done a lot of research on ways to slow down the spread such as harvesting infected plants last, and using different harvesting tools for healthy plants vs. infected plants. Janaki has also done a lot of research to see if any organic materials can be used in slowing disease. The downside is, just like Aster Yellows, there is no cure for these diseases. Eventually the plants will get too stressed and weak, causing them to begin either producing funny looking and strange tasting vegetables, or the plants will stop producing entirely. 

I know this wasn’t as upbeat of a newsletter as normal, but farming isn’t always happiness and sunshine. Farming is all about how you manage and move forward. We’ve never given up when things get hard. We reach out to new resources and experts, we pour an extra cup of coffee, say a few colorful words, and get back to it. This time of year can be hard looking at all the veggies that didn’t make it, but it sure makes us appreciate the veggies that did make it. We hope that this week when you get your box, you take a moment to look at all the beautiful vegetables and know that each one of them was grown with love, sweat, and maybe some dog fur.

In your share this week:

Mixed Salad

Note:  ingredients are chopped or cut into very small pieces in order to absorb the dressing and each each others’ flavors better. 

Chop all the ingredients and cut them into a very small dice. Mix them together in a bowl.  Dress with the following tahini cream dressing and mix well. 

Tahini Cream

Crushed the garlic with the salt. Mix it with a little lemon juice in a large bowl add the tahini and mix well then add the remaining lemon juice and enough cold water to achieve a thick smooth cream while beating vigorously season salt and cumin.  Add more lemon juice, garlic or salt (all to taste) until the flavor is strong and tart. 

This dressing may be used for many salads