hoophouse

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 July 24th – CSA Newsletter

Potato field!

Week 7 of the TC3 Farm CSA is here! That means we’re about 1/3 of the way through the season. I’m not exactly sure where the time has gone but I can’t believe that it’s almost August. And guess what? It rained a bunch again. I’ve been able to sneak in some tractor work here and there to prep some fields but we still have a field that we haven’t been able to get in all season because of how wet it’s been. And even though the weeds are growing at an epic pace, this wet weather makes them easy to pull. We slowly but surely continue to make our way through the fields. Last week we made it through our potatoes and were able to “hill” them. “Hilling” potatoes is when we mound soil around the base of the potato plants. This allows them to grow more potatoes per foot and protect them from sun exposure. After our potatoes, we started our field peppers. Hopefully, we’ll get through them this week.

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Week of July 10th – CSA Newsletter

Greenhouse tomatoes growing, growing and growing!

Week 5 of the TC3 Farm CSA is here and we had an entire week without any significant rain events. This time last year, I was in total freak out mode with the lack of rain. This past week was a welcome relief but looking ahead, it looks like the rain is returning. We kept plugging away at our weekly plantings by getting in lettuce, basil, carrots, beets, kale, collards, chinese cabbage, cucumbers and fennel. Our greenhouse tomatoes are finally all tied and are really starting to take off, as well as the hoophouse tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants.

Hoophouse eggplants
Hoophouse peppers

It shouldn’t be too long until we can start harvesting these crops and filling your bellies with summer goodness!

This week’s share has a bunch of new items in it. There will be the first chard of the season. It’s not too big and can easily be eaten raw or lightly sautéed. There will also be fresh garlic. This isn’t the biggest garlic but the plants are telling me that it’s time to start harvesting them. Fresh garlic isn’t cured like you see in the store and it’s flavor is slightly mild but can be used just as you’d use garlic that is cured. Another new crop this week is sorrel. Sorrel has a lemony/sour flavor and is a nice addition to salads. I also like to add it to pasta dishes by pouring the boiling water over the chopped sorrel when draining the pasta. There won’t be any snow peas in the share this week (I think) but there will be sugar snap peas. The last new addition this week will be cucumbers.

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Week of July 3rd – CSA Newsletter

Monarch caterpillar snacking on some milkweed

Happy 4th of July!

I’m not exactly sure what happened to June but here we are. Things are rocking and rolling on the farm; transplanting, weeding and harvesting. This past week, we started planting our fall brassicas. It never ceases to amaze me that we plant our fall broccoli and cabbage before we start harvesting our spring plantings. We continued our weekly maintenance of our hoophouse and greenhouse tomatoes. The signs of summer are here because fruits are starting to form on the plants.

Heirloom tomatoes beginning to form!

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