Flowers like these calendulas are coming along nicely despite the unseasonably cool nights.
Tania will have lots of gorgeous bouquets for sale this Thursday and Saturday on the farm.
Also plenty of flowers this Sunday at the Logan Square Farmer's Market!
Our hardworking crew harvests arugula from under 'row cover'.
This physical barrier protects certain crops from certain pests.
It is also helpful in keeping the covered crop just a bit warmer and moister, therefore
shaving off a few days from the calendar and giving us mature vegetables a few days sooner.
This is a FULL SHARES week...Full Vegetable & Fruit Shares!
Pick up is Thursday, June 20th.
4-7 pm at your respective site.
Next week is an ALL SHARES week again so HALF SHARE folks, no pick up this week.
Your Vegetable Harvest for this Week...
Garlic Scapes (the unopened flower of the garlic plant)
Head Lettuce (2 green oak leaf & 2 mini red romaine)
Arugula
Chinese Cabbage (from our hoophouse)
Dandelion Greens (long, serrated, dark green leaves)
Sorrel (shorter, lemony leaves)
Green Scallions
Spicy Mustard Salad Mix
Green Asparagus (from Mick Klug Farm)
Your Fruit Harvest for this Week...Strawberries (3 quarts!)
Q. "Where is all the fruit?" some may ask.-
A. Well, in this part of our country strawberries are what is ripe and ready.
This also has been quite a cold spring so other luscious fruits are on their way but just need a little more time.
It can definitely be a big challenge to eat locally and seasonably.
We are so used to eating bananas, (number 1 consumed fruit in the US) pineapples, oranges and asparagus for that matter whenever and wherever we desire so we forget that they are shipped from thousands of miles away.
So, we will get a wide variety of fantastic fruit in the weeks and months to come (we have heard about sweet cherries possible for next week!) but for now nature has given us strawberries and gosh darn it, we are gonna savor and appreciate those incredibly aromatic and sweet beauties while their fleeting season lasts! After all we all did sign up for this local, seasonal farming thing didn't we? Sure we could fly and truck in exotic edibles from around the country and the globe but that's not what we do. Right? For that, we could go to any grocery store on any corner of this country. Lets give the grocery stores and shipping companies a little time off this season.
Who's with us? Yeah!
Here you see Jason (in the skid steer) and Frank (white shirt) installing
our new deer fence. We have put this unfortunate but necessary expense on hold for
long enough. The local deer population is by far the most costly pest on the farm. The damage that flea beetles, cucumber beetles, thrips, Colorado potato beetles, birds, raccoons, etc. pales in comparison to the damage that deer do every year. We are dropping a significant amount of money to protect our crops from the relentless fauna.
Speaking of pest protection.
Joe (L) and Tomas are rolling our yet another batch of row cover to protect all our
cucurbits (cucumbers, summer and winter squash, melons...) from cucumber beetles and squash bugs as well as to keep them a little warmer until they grow large and have many flowers. We will remove the covers in the coming weeks to allow pollinators to do their very important work.
Speaking of pollinators.
Our bee hives are busy indeed.
This picture was taken on a chilly 50 degree morning. The bees were just readying themselves
for a long day of pollination, nectar collection and general hive duties.
Speaking of duties.
Kate is up to her shoulders in our perennial yarrow beds.
Ok, so she's actually kneeling but the yarrow is wonderful and while it makes
great fresh cut bouquets, yarrow also dries beautifully and will keep for years.
Speaking of flowers.
Our many thousands of row feet of potatoes are just beginning to bloom.
Just below soil level, the plants are hard at work sizing up tubers that will begin to be ready
in about a month or maybe sooner.
There just may be hoophouse potatoes in your veggie shares next week!
Peter here is getting serious about weeding our storage onion crop by hand.
While we do a fair amount of mechanical cultivation with tractor mounted cultivation tools,
sometimes the weeds do get the best of us.
Please stop by and see us to purchase retail farm products.....
*Every Thursday 4 - 7 pm on the farm
*Every Saturday 8 am - 2 pm on the farm (except This Saturday)
*Every Sunday 10 am - 3 pm at the Logan Square Farmers Market
*Every first and third Sundays of the month
May 5 through October 20, 2013 9 am - 3 pm at Chicago Botanic Garden
www.tempelfarmsorganics.com
