Please Return Your Box(s) this week. If you don’t bring your empty box, you can’t take another box. You can have this week’s produce out of the box, just not the box.
Six of our ten fields have been sown to the Fall cover crop, a combination of Rye or Wheat along with Hairy Vetch, Crimson Clover, and Austrian Winter Pea. We need a little rain to get them to start growing. It feels really good to have more than half the farm put to bed for the winter. There’s still plenty to do to keep us busy, but we’re starting to see the lights at the end of the tunnel. We’ve laid the landscape fabric down which will keep the weeds down in the strawberry batch next year. The strawberries will hopefully get planted on Thursday. There will be a bed of mixed over-wintering flowers, three beds of garlic and three beds of onions next to the strawberries. Vanessa has a few long term projects that involve planting some new things on the farm. We’ve got a big bed of Hydrangeas to go in, along with a bunch of Peonies. We planted 25 Lilac bushes this Spring, so there will be new and different flowers in the offerings in the next few years.
I’m not sure why I didn’t mention this last week, it was a bit exciting…our neighbor’s barn burned down about 10 days ago. The cause has not been determined, and we’d rather not know the truth, judging from some of the rumors flying around the valley. But we woke to loud popping noises at about 2am, looked out our bedroom window to see giant flames. We ran out, confirmed that it was the barn and not our neighbor’s house, and called in the firetrucks. By the time they got there, the 50 foot flames had collapsed the roof of the barn, and there wan’t much they could do to safe it. We were extremely lucky that there was no wind that night. Our barn and all our equipment is only a few hundred feet away. We were lucky there were not embers flying toward our barn that night. Anyway, no one was injured, lots of hay was ruined, a few pieces of equipment melted.