TC3 Farm

Week of October 16th – CSA Newsletter

The oats/peas cover crop is coming along.

We’ve made it to the home stretch, folks. Week 19 of the CSA is upon us. There are 3 remaining weeks to the CSA season after this week. It’s been a roller coaster ride of a farm season that I’ll be sure to recap in the coming weeks.

But first, some farm updates. We finished getting the rest of the potatoes out of the ground last week. It definitely feels good to get a harvest like that done for the season. Potatoes aren’t one of the easiest of crops to harvest at the TC3 Farm. We really don’t grow enough potatoes to justify purchasing a potato harvester, so we dig our taters by using a digging fork. After loosening the soil with the forks, it’s on to our hands and knees to go searching for our “buried treasure”. It’s definitely a satisfying job but not always the easiest, especially when you have as many rocks in the field as we do.

After a beautiful weekend, today was the first real miserable day (mostly the morning) on the farm of the season. Even after all the wet weather we had this year, I can honestly say that. This was the kind of day that comes to mind when people comment to me on how awesome it must be to be working outside all the time. You know, that first really cold, wet kinda day. The one where your hands are really cold and they start to go numb while you harvest or do field work or wash veggies. Now, this isn’t a Puddles Pity Party, not in the least. I’m just saying that farmers work in all extremes to get done what needs to get done. And today that was harvesting.

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Week of October 8th – CSA Newsletter

Sunset over the farm!

Aah, October. What a great time of the year. The landscape is transforming as the foliage begins to turn. The days are getting shorter and Playoff baseball has begun!

Life on the farm continues to roll on by as we get closer to the end of the season. The harvest, along with cleanup projects keeps us busy these days. Besides cleaning out the hoophouses when they are ready, the next big project will be to plant next year’s garlic. I always aim for the week of Halloween to get garlic in the ground. And that is quickly approaching. I’ll keep you posted with our progress.

Nothing too exciting happened last week on the farm. I did harvest the first of our baby ginger at the end of the week to take down to the Fire Cider Celebration and Market in Press Bay Alley in Ithaca.

Baby ginger!

That was a really cool event because all of the vendors were selling the ingredients needed to make fire cider. If you’ve never had fire cider before, I highly recommend it. Especially in the winter months. It’s a traditional folk remedy that is a serious immune booster!

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Week of October 2nd – CSA Newsletter

Well, it’s finally happened….. The first frost of the year. After another beautiful start to the week, the end of last week finally returned to appropriate fall temperatures. And then over the weekend we had our first two frosty mornings. The first frost of the season is always a little bittersweet to me. I look at it as the end of the summer season of vegetables and then the true start of the fall heartiness. Lots of the fall crops that we grow begin to sweeten up as their sugars go into overdrive with the cooler nighttime temperatures. Our fall carrots (which we haven’t begun to harvest yet) really benefit from this. Even though we had these frosts, there wasn’t too much damage. I was hoping to get one more harvest of basil but it was toast this morning when I got out to the field. The only other crop that showed any significant signs of damage was our beans. We have two more plantings out in the field, one that we started harvesting last week and one that is loaded with flowers. I’m hopeful that we’ll still get some more beans but we’ll have to wait and see.

Last week we continued to our push to get ready for the winter months on the farm. Because the weather can turn to the point of no return at any moment, we are trying to get larger quantities of our root crops out of the ground. We were able to get more beets, carrots and potatoes out of the ground. Hopefully, most of the rest of them will be out by the end of the month. Another big job last week was to “top” our heirloom tomato plants.

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Week of September 25th – CSA Newsletter

Ok, so it’s September 25th. Fall is officially here and we just had our best stretch of weather all season by a long shot. These are strange times, my friends. I am definitely not complaining but we sure could have used some of these dry, warm days back in July. Aah, the life of a farmer. Loves being outside but never truly content with the weather.

Last week was a big week of visitors to the TC3 Farm. There were 3 different classes from Tompkins Cortland (2 English and 1 Environmental Science) and a group from New Roots High School. All in all, it was around 50 students out for a visit. It’s always great to have folks out for a visit and expose them to what we do at the TC3 Farm and all the hard work that the Sustainable Farming and Food Systems do during their internship. In the very least, I hope that we get folks thinking about where their food comes from and how their food choices can impact the local food system.

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Week of September 18th – CSA Newsletter

We love spotting a praying mantis in the field!

Alrighty folks, week 15 of the CSA  is here! We have 7 weeks of the CSA season left. I was getting a little worried about how the weather seemed to be turning so quickly but we got a nice reprise of Summer-like days, especially over the weekend, and this week looks like a perfect one.

Getting ready to seed an oats/peas cover crop.

I was able to take advantage and start planting cover crops in some areas that are done for the season. Cover crops play an important role on our farm in the fall/winter. Cover crops suppress winter weeds, provide erosion control, add organic matter and return nutrients to the soil. These are all important things since we don’t use any synthetic fertilizers or herbicides on our farm. It was pretty good timing when I got them in on Wednesday because we had a nice little rain on Thursday. When we were out in the field today, I noticed that they had germinated over the weekend. Hopefully, there will be a few more weeks of nice weather to help them establish themselves. I’ll keep you posted.

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