Week 10

When something is important to you it is often tied up in a lot of emotion:  joy, frustration, worry, etc.  Since the farm is so important to me, I ride a roller coaster of emotion through the season.  The highs are fantastic, the lows equally extreme in the other direction.  Over time I have gotten better at not getting too caught up in the lows.  It is rare that there is a complete loss of a crop.  Today I was reminded twice that often things can turn around and end up not being that bad.  Kelly and I walked through the onions when we were making your box list this morning.  In late May the onions were a disaster.  We grew beautiful starts, but after transplant they started dying.  Onions always suffer from transplant shock, but usually after looking like they aren't growing or even looking like they are shrinking for a few weeks they start to take off.  They don't usually die.  After a lot of freaking out and a bit of investigation we discovered we had onion maggots.  Unattractive as they are destructive, they eat the inside of the onion plant until it dies and then move on to the next one in the line.  I read that there can be three generations in a season, but it appears that so far we have only been effected by the first one.   Although it felt like we were loosing onion after onion, in the end it was probably about 15 percent.  The onions that are left look great.  Perhaps the little extra space helped.  Perhaps all the water we pounded them with because we didn't know what else to do and needed to feel like we were doing something helped.  I don't know.  Anyway, you will be getting one of those nice onions in your box this week.  More recently the deer got into our cucumber house and ate the tops off the plants.  These are the Japanese cukes and Persian cukes that we trellis.  In other words there was already a lot of labor and time invested in these plants.  It was probably the low point of my summer.   Most of the cucumbers had another growth point that was just starting (we prune larger growth points to keep the plants to one leader) and while it set us back a couple weeks almost all of them have made a comeback and are starting to produce cucumbers.   You have cucumbers out of this house in your box today.  When it comes to joy it is great to savor the moment, but when things aren't going well it is much better to look towards the future and keep the big picture in mind. 

Cheers to a great week and good food.

Lettuce
Corn  
Japanese Cucumber
Sun Jewel Korean Melon - The melon I mentioned last week that always kicks off our season.  It is mild, sweet and refreshing.   There is a chance that we won't have enough for everyone, in which case you will get one next week. 
Cherry Tomatoes
Walla Walla Onion
Garlic
Tomatillos - Large Only  - Small shares will get them next week.
Slicing Tomato - Large Only