Well hello there! It's been a while, I know. My sincerest apologies but things are really gearing up here. We'll start with the good stuff...
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| Dylan wearing an asparagus boutonniere |
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| Delphinium |
We had our first farmer's market in Prescott on Saturday morning and it went great! All five interns were in attendance, plus Cory and Shanti. The snooze button started getting pushed at 4:30, but we hit the road on schedule with a full trailer of goodies to sell to our excited customer base. We sold out of asparagus in the first hour and rhubarb soon followed. Japanese salad turnips, radishes, spring salad mix, mesclun salad mix, braising mix, rapini, heads of lettuce, bok choy, tatsoi, chard, kale, spinach, cilantro, basil, sage, mint, oregano, thyme, bunches of delphinium, dried chilies and eggs also made appearances. Before coming to Whipstone, I held a variety of customer service positions in the restaurant industry and thusly enjoy interacting with people and selling them a product in which I believe.
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| Olive hiding in one of our harvesting baskets |
Something completely new to me, however, is harvesting produce in mass quantities. To make it just that much more fun, almost every vegetable is picked in a different way with different tools and bunched in different sizes. For instance, with salad mix we use large snips, or scissors, to cut whole sections of rows that contain each of the different varieties of lettuce then take our overflowing baskets to the washing shed to be cleaned and weighed into bags. In the past I highly enjoyed picking root vegetables because of the awe-inspringness of plucking something out of the ground. I continue to enjoying pulling beets the size of my face out of the earth, but I my thoughts are now plagued by focusing on finding the largest beet in a clump, fighting not to pull up the roots of the smaller beets in the clump, creating the right size bunch that will look good, and finally not snapping my rubber band as I secure the greens together (beet greens- YUM!). Therefore, I am currently most enjoying cutting head lettuce. This requires a lettuce knife, a quick snip - really more like a jab - at the base, then a quick clean up of any left over stem or yellow leaves. As with much of our produce, we must rush these items to the washing shed before it starts to wilt in the baking sun and they most of the harvesting is done in the morning before the heat of the day.
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| Fixing the roof of the greenhouse |
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| Steph planting tomatoes |
Most afternoons, in between picking for the markets and weekly CSAs, major plantings are happening. Over 700 pounds of potatoes went into the ground at the new property, along with acres of pinto beans, some corn, summer squash, and, my personal favorite, TOMATOES! We did plant some early tomatoes in the big greenhouse that are almost ready, even though the roof ripped off in the wind.
Bringing me to the bad: as we attempted to re-roof the plastic this morning, the wind strength slowly picked up. Just as the forth side was being fixed into place, another mean gust of wind ripped it right off again, negating hours of work and hundreds of square feet of plastic.
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| so many tomatoes |
Sigh... so it goes.
