Hello and welcome to a chilly week 13 of the Wellspring CSA.  Cool night, brisk mornings and apples ripening are all contributing to this week feeling very much like it's late September or even October even though we are still in August. Fortunately this is not adversely affecting the vegetables all that much.  Sure the zucchini and cucumbers are growing a bit slower than when it was 90 degrees, but the plants are still looking great and the heat will come again. For whatever reason, however, the tomatoes are responding to the cool weather by ripening very quickly.  To me it seems like the plants are really pushing the fruits to ripen because they think it's fall too and they are going to get killed soon so they need to reproduce. The great news from all that, is we have a bunch of tomatoes for you this week and they should keep coming strong for awhile.

Since it is "fall", it seems like high time to talk about organic apples. As you noticed last week, and will notice this week, the apples you are receiving are not as aesthetically perfect as the ones you are used to buying in the grocery store or farmers market. Our apples have little bumps, scabs or indentations, some may be a strange shape.  The apples still taste great and we did the best job we could to make sure the damage was only superficial and did not go into the apple at all.  In this part of the country apples are favored by a number of insects. There is about a month span in early summer when the major pests are laying eggs and at that time we can intervene and spray the apples to keep the bugs off.  We spray a compound called surround, which is essentially porcelain clay that coats the apple to make the insects not want to land. Unfortunately the clay wears off when it rains so for a month we have to reapply this surround to the trees. The other issue is we only have 15 trees which means we haven't yet felt we should invest in an expensive sprayer that could quickly and easily spray all the trees because we would only use it one month a year for 15 trees and there are many more pressing needs like a barn roof and pickup truck that funding needs to be found for.  We have experimented with other options with limited success so we still use a small backpack sprayer to spray the trees.  This tool can only reach 8 or 9 feet in the air while our trees are 20+ feet tall.  It is also very time consuming, taking about 2 hours each time we need to spray.  That time of year it can be very difficult to find an extra 2 hours away from the vegetables.

That was a long way of saying; we tried our best to keep the apples damage free but were not entirely successful. As I stated before, the damage should all be on the surface with beautiful, sweet, tasty apple underneath. Just to be certain, cut into the apple before eating.

Lets hope the summer comes back before too long and I hope you thoroughly enjoy your share this week.