|
Hi,
What a Saturday before Labor Day! I wasn't sure if we were going to get this newsletter out on time since we were out of power most of the day Saturday and Consumers was saying they hoped to have power restored sometime Sunday. We got our power back at four in the morning but not our phone or internet until late morning. Happily, except for a short torrential downpour, the only problem at the farm market was that we had no power and thus no water to wash stuff and to drink. Most of the damaging winds seemed to occur just south of the Muskegon river.
We are now picking acorn, butternut and spaghetti winter squash big time. Looks like a bumper harvest for the butternut and a good harvest for the acorn. We should also start our buttercup squash shortly. We are still picking our large 30th patch of sweet corn and there are four more patches to go. Unlike other years, the last couple of patches look real nice. The 30th and 31st patches are bi-color Mirai, while the other three patches are Jackpot and Lancelot-both bi-color. We are still picking Paulared, Zestar and Gravenstein apples and will start our Jonamac and Earliblaze apples soon. While we are done with our redhaven peaches, we are still picking our Flamin' Fury PF17's (which we prefer to the redhavens) and will start picking the PF-24's soon.
As mentioned before, we have a bumper crop of delicious watermelons and are selling good sized, great tasting watermelons for $2.00 each. I believe our tomatoes are peaking now in quantity and quality and the next week or so is the time to get you canning tomatoes. We are selling them for $10 a ½ bushel and $18 a bushel. We also are starting to pick our Roma paste tomatoes. We sell them for $12 a half bushel. Right now most of our slicing tomatoes are Mountain Fresh and are really good eating even though they are a relatively firm tomato. We also have a good selection of Heirloom tomatoes of several different colors including yellow, orange and greenish yellow (Green Zebra). If you only like a red tomato I would recommend the Mortgage Lifter since it is nice and red and is still loaded with flavor.
We still have a good supply of yellow and green beans and next week we should be able to start picking our last patch of green beans-which looks real nice. We are rapidly winding down on our slicing and pickling cucumbers. However, we still have another patch coming but are unsure if and when it will be ready since it is so late and we haven't always been successful with very late plantings of cucumbers. We started digging our sweet potatoes and have them for sale. We were told by customers they are very tasty-although they didn't mention their sweetness. We agree that they do have a real delicious fresh taste-they also are ideal for sweet potato fries right now since fresh sweet potatoes don't have as much sugar as sweet potatoes kept for several weeks.
Our sweet bell pepper crop looks great (which is much different from last year) and we are now selling half bushels of real nice peppers for $10! Peppers are real easy to freeze-just wash well, cut up and put in freezer bags and drop the bags into a deep freeze. We've been doing this for years and works fantastic!
Nashle,
Tom
| 
