Dear Friends,

Happy 4th of July!!  Here we are in the 5th week of the share.  The summer solstice has passed and from here on out the days will slowly get a little shorter.  It is an important time on the farm for crop development and the height of the planting season for many of our fall crops.  The weather in the next few weeks has alot to do with how our summer and fall crops will shape up. 

After spending April and May emptying out our greenhouse in a transplanting frenzy we spent a lot of time in June filling the greenhouse back up.  It is now chock full of Brussels Sprouts, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Cabbage, Scallions, Fennel, and several more successions of Lettuce waiting to fill the rest of our open field space. 

The end of June into early July is a mile marker for our onion crop.  The day length around the solstice signals the onions to stop focussing on foliar growth and begin to bulb up.  Our onions currently look fantastic!  We've spent countless hours with both our crew and some additional hired hands pulling weeds and I'm happy to report that our 2 plus acres of onions are now weed free.  Now is the time that we seed our large fall root crop plantings so by weeks end we'll have sown many hundreds of thousands of carrots, beets, parsnips, rutabaga and the like that will keep us fed well into the winter.  Each week through mid August we'll transplant another succession planting of Brassica crops (broccoli family including but not limited to kale, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli) in a premeditated and hopefully tactful effort to keep everyone's palates excited and bellys satisfied for the next several months.  
Amidst the buzz of early summer the farm is starting to hit stride.  We've finally been blessed with a mostly dry week after watching the rain take away what was a promising strawberry crop early on.  We played catch up last week and for the first time this year we completed our exceedingly ambitious plan for the week with time to do some other things that we hadn't planned on.

I think our unborn baby must already have some idea of what it means to be a farmer as he or she has waited so patiently beyond the due date.  Now we alot more caught up on the farm than we were two weeks ago and everyone on the  crew has a few weeks of harvesting under their belts.  What better time to have a baby???  We'll we are not quite there yet but we are in the hospital.  I think I confirmed the old addage "You can take the boy off the farm but can't take the farm off the boy" as I unknowingly tracked dirt from the farm all the way into our hospital room.  As some type of hybrid between Pigpen from Charlie Brown and Hansel and Gretel I made sure we'll find our way back to the farm with our new baby.  Thanks to all of you for your words of encouragement and the outpouring of support you've given us.  In our absence we have had some great farmer friends step up to help our awesome crew keep the farm going.  Our friends Ben and Liz from Mountainview Farm are sending their whole crew over for a day this week to help us keep up with our weed battle and our friend Michael Docter who we have so much to thank for already has given us another thing to thank him for by volunteering some time doing tractor work.  We're thinking of you all fondly and will see you again next week.  As always.... enjoy the harvest!!

On behalf of the farm crew (Olivia, Sarah, Max, Jason, Ben, and Maryn)

Your Farmers,

Rob and Meghan