and since you gave us some dough, let it grow, let it grow, let it grow

It's been a good couple of weeks around here. Planting, picking, planting, picking, oh yes and weeding. You can add weeding about three times in between planting and picking. What loves sunshine, irrigated and well fertilized soil more than vegetable plants? - WEEDS!! This is the time of the season when it's really important to stay on top of them.

Better than picking weeds this week has been the arrival of our new intern, Claire. She's coming to us via a farm in Massachusetts, via our friends at Frog Bottom Farm. She was their intern for the summer of 2009 and apparently built up quite a reputation within the CSA circuit. A reputation that could be liken to a celebrity status. A week before her arrival here at Fertile Crescent I had more people than I can remember stop by our tent at the St. Stephens Farmers Market letting me know how thrilled they were that Claire was back on Virginia soil. I had no idea of her popularity, we're happy to have her with us. I just hope all of this adulation doesn't go to her head because she's still gonna have to pull weeds!!


Last week my lost post was mostly about eating seasonal food and how some of the local growers are getting frustrated at how lax the farmer's market managers have been getting about letting purveyors in. I won't go as deeply into it right now, but I would recommend if you shop the markets and see blueberries right now or cantaloupes or anything suspiciously out of season, it probably is and it probably came from a distribution warehouse. Anyone can go to one of these distribution whorehouses, oops, I mean warehouses and purchase produce from here to Florida and bring it to the farmers market. I've said this before and I'll say it again, if you care about buying produce from a person whose hands were in the dirt tending to the vegetables you are buying - ask questions! There seem to be a lot of Agri-fakers out there - of the fruity kind. But like I said, I won't get into too much right now, I was feeling much more passionate about it last week and it's probably good my post was lost!

Excuse me while I step down from my soap box and get back to the farm.

I must praise the uses of compost tea. Earlier this season we had a late spring freeze that turned the leaves of several rows of our tomato plants black. We thought they were gonners for sure! Adam sprayed them with a compost tea, a miracle tea of a sort.... holy water you could say..... and today they are GORGEOUS. Praise be to the rotted vegetables, coffee grinds and a sundry of other compostables that made this tea.

Eggplant - mehhh, that's another story. The flea beetles have decimated the leaves of the plants. They'll make a comeback too. This happens every year. There's not much to do about the dreaded flea beetle except wait it out. They don't seem to be so bad in the summer.

This week we'll be harvesting
kale, collards, spring onions, salad mix, endive, pac choy, squash, zucchini, cukes, okra, green beans, basil, swiss chard, broccoli rabe, beets, cherry tomatoes and radishes
Some of this will be in shares and some will be found only at the farmer's market until we have enough for all of the members.

More pics to come this week!