Third Sunday Gatherings
|
Third Sunday Gatherings are back this season! For those of you who are new
to the farm or to Third Sunday Gatherings, they are a great opportunity to meet
fellow shareholders and learn about various topics related to our mission. Each
time, we will start with a farm-fresh potluck at five o'clock followed by a
guest speaker.
June 17th - Composting, Karen DiFranza of Down to Earth Farm
(Hubbardston) - As harvest begins, Karen will teach us how we can put the
vegetable scraps to good use.
July 15th - Eat Your Greens Contest - Can't get your kids
to eat Kohlrabi, Kale, Collards, etc.? Bring a potluck
kid-friendly dish, and a copy of the recipe, using one
of the more unfamiliar or unpopular vegetables in your household. We'll let the
kids sample first and judge their favorites. Recipe exchange and discussion
will follow.
August 19th - Putting Food By: An Introduction to
Preservation Methods - Is the harvest becoming too
bountiful? Come learn the basics of preservation so you can look forward to a
"local" taste of summer during the long New England winter.
September 16th - ***TBD***Have Suggested Topics or Speakers? - send
them to Alison Horton.
October 21st - Panel on WFCF Programs: Hunger Relief, Education, Volunteers - Representatives from various
WFCF programs will talk about the work they do.
November 18th - Harvest Potluck - Details to follow.
December 16th - Winter Solstice - Details to follow.
Third Sunday Gatherings begin at 5. Please bring a farm-fresh potluck item to share and in the interest of
conservation, your own place setting.
|
|
|
Welcome to the 2007 Harvest Season!
Share pickups at the farm are: - Tuesday, June 12,
3-7:30 PM
- Thursday,
June 14, 3-7:30 PM
- Sunday,
June 17, 3-7:30 PM
Share pickups in Somerville are Tuesday June 12 from 5-7 PM.
Bring bags if you have them! Bring your own household compost if you don't mind the walk to the compost piles.
|
What's in the shares this week
Please note: this list is prepared
the week before we harvest your share.
Some guesswork is involved: some
things may be in the share that are not on the list, and some listed things may
not be in the share.
Lettuce
- Red
and green 'grand rapids'
style and butterheads; speckled 'trout' heads
Salad and
Cooking Greens
- Arugula
- spicy shareholder favorite for salads and light cooking
- Mizuna
- not spicy but full of flavor for sautee or salads
- Hon
Tsai Tai - pleasant, mild taste raw in salads or lightly cooked
- Tatsoi
- mild, spoon-shaped leaves
- Pac
Choi - delicious in stir fries and other Asian specialties
- Endive -
use this crisp, bitter green in salads or cook it as a side dish
- Spinach -
limited quantities, but delicious from the farm!
- Kohlrabi -
sweet and delicately flavored; can be eaten raw or cooked, like broccoli stems
Root Crops
-
Spring
turnips - deliciously crisp and white - use like radishes
- Radishes
Alliums
- White
and purple scallions
Looking for some recipe ideas for cooking greens?! For even more ideas, see our Produce Info and Recipes.
|
Pick your own crops this week
- Oregano
- Chives
with flower tops
- a handful of sugar snap peas
CSA
shareholders can visit the farm to pick your own herbs Sunday through Thursday
during daylight hours. Visit the red
pick-your-own kiosk in the fields for a list of available crops and picking
supplies.
|
Coming soon
This forecast will hopefully help
you plan ahead. It's slightly more
reliable than a weather report.
- Carrots
- Beets
- Kale
- Napa Cabbage
- Broccoli
Raab (Rapini)
- Broccoli
(maybe!)
|
Comings and goings on the farm
We said
goodbye to our fantastic spring interns from the Gann Academy,
Emily Jaeger and Sage Ungerleider. This
week, Anna Wei and Sara Franklin joined the team as summer season interns,
completing our summer farm staff.
Recent volunteer
groups on the farm included graduating seniors from Chapel Hill-Chauncy Hall in
Waltham and Belmont High School
and students from the Waltham YMCA.
|
Crop updates
The June 1st
planting marathon is over: tomatoes,
peppers, eggplant and sweet potatoes are in the ground in time for the rains
from tropical storm Barry. The hot, dry
weather at the end of May caused some drought loss in our early cucumbers,
planted at the Lyman Estate fields where we have no irrigation. Weeds are growing at a brisk pace, but our
stellar farm crew is keeping up with them so far. We have not suffered the major damage from
onion and cabbage root maggot that we have in past years, but we did have a
significant invasion of Japanese beetle grubs that chewed on the roots of our
lettuce, spinach and early brassicas (hence the "maybe" beside the
broccoli listed above - but spring broccoli is generally a gamble anyway). We
applied milky spore, a bacteria that attacks the grubs, to parts of the field
where we were seeing the greatest losses in hopes that the bacteria will
inoculate the soil and prevent further infestation. It seems like additional tillage in the
future will help us expose the grubs so that they'll be gobbled up by our
resident killdeers, sandpipers and cowbirds before we plant a crop into the
ground.
Our cover
crops, after a late start because of cold weather at the beginning of April,
took off during the month of May. It is
really a joy to walk around the farm and see tall stands of rye, vetch and
field peas growing in many of the fields, providing nutrients and organic
matter for the fields that have given us so much. They also provide habitat for lots of
beneficial insects as well as some of our less favorite animals, including baby
woodchucks and bunnies. We'll be turning
them in bit by bit as we plant the fields, but check them out before we do if
you get a chance.
|
|
Notes from the field
It's been
a long time since I enjoyed spring.
Since I can remember, it has seemed like a season filled with
uncertainty, when a surprise frost could kill the buds on a fruit tree or a
four-day nor'easter could sweep down and flood a field full of just-planted
seedlings. It is a time when voracious
newly hatched bugs gobble up tender young crops, when a 40 degree day is
followed by a 90 degree day and a key piece of equipment malfunctions at a
critical planting time. I generally live
through spring with knots of anxiety in my stomach and a head filled with
planting schedules and pest management plans.
For years, I have thought of it as a season when, frankly, things could
go either way: we could ride out the turbulence
of April and May and coast gently into summer, or a yawning gap could open in
the space-time continuum and we could be launched into something completely
different and unexpected, like the next ice age. This is not a particularly pleasant way to
spend one quarter of the year.
This year,
something is different. I've been
noticing how beautiful the fields look in the soft light, the flight of a pair
of orioles into the plum tree in the children's garden, the sounds of the
migrating warblers. I've enjoyed the one
of the best spring tonics, nettle soup with toasty bread, and looked forward to
the upcoming harvest. I've been planting
flowers.
I'm not
sure what exactly has changed. There
were the usual ups and downs: a broken tractor, a pest problem, a little
drought - but despite all of that, spring felt almost tranquil to me this
year. Many times over the course of this
normally chaotic season, I found myself feeling only one thing -
gratitude. Kate, incredibly thoughtful
as always, sent away for a pair of noise-blocking headphones that we can wear
when we're on the tractor that also broadcast the radio. Listening to an early-season Red Sox game on
those headphones while preparing beds in which Beaver Country Day students
could plant celery and looking out across these familiar fields was one of the
most calming experiences of my farming career.
Our farm is better staffed than we have ever been - we have an amazing
executive director and assistant farm manager, along with talented and
dedicated assistant growers and a great crew of summer interns. This is my fourth season on a farm that I am
slowly, ever so slowly, beginning to understand, and many of you coming out to
the farm this week are returning shareholders who feel like old friends. I don't know if all of those things add up to
inner peace, especially for a farmer in the springtime, but they certainly make
a difference. Maybe
it's the growth of a little faith. Maybe
it's simply that as I grow older, I no longer expect to not feel stress and
anxiety - I only hope to enjoy the moments when they are briefly replaced by a
kind of grace. Or maybe it's just the
new tractor headphones. You never know.
|
|
From all the staff at Waltham Fields Community Farm:
Meg Coward, Executive Director Amanda Cather, Farm Manager Andy Scherer, Assistant Farm Manager Kate Darakjy and Martin Lemos, Assistant Growers Josh Levin, Vincent Errico, Anna Wei, and Sara Franklin, Interns
|
|
|