Main Season Harvest #3 (Week A) should include salad radishes, salad turnips (hakurei), kale, swiss chard, mini head lettuce, romaine, lettuce mix, escarole, radicchio, cilantro, dill, and garlic scapes. Some items will be a choice. U-pick should include a small handful of herbs (please bring scissors), snow peas, and strawberries.

This is surely some perfect weather. Low humidity, cool nights, plenty of sunshine, warm but not hot days, sandwiched between decent rain events. This is ideal weather for ripening strawberries. It also helps us farmers grind through the last week or so of peak crop planting. It feels endless, this time of infinite sowing, but we're soon rounding a corner into maintenance of long season crops and eventual harvest of those crops. We'll still plant some crops weekly, like lettuce, cilantro, dill, and beans, and have a lot of crops to plant for late summer and fall harvest, but soon the bulk of transplanting will be behind us.

Last week 3,000+ feet of sweet potatoes were planted, as well as zucchini, cucumbers, lettuce, basil, cilantro, dill, beans, edamame, chard, and cantaloupe. This coming week the 2nd round of tomatoes goes in, as well as 1000 feet of leeks, which more or less marks the end of the big spring planting time. At the end of June or early July we'll transplant the 2023 strawberry patch plants, begin sowing seeds for fall crops, and begin thinking about establishing season-ending cover crops, starting another phase of the growing season.

Last week we began installing trellising on the u-pick cherry tomatoes. One hundred 7-foot metal posts were pounded, wire was strung, and tomato plants were pruned and clipped to the wire. As the plants grow for the next couple of months additional levels of wire will be added and plants will be secured and kept elevated off the ground (for ease of harvest and disease suppression). Next in line are the tunnel tomatoes which desperately need to be pruned. Twine will be suspended from the tunnel rafters for the vines to be anchored to. Soon the 3000 feet of sweet and hot peppers will need to be staked and held up with twine. Eight thousand feet of potatoes were hilled and cultivated last week. We'll try to do this one more time before the plants get too big for us to safely drive the tractor over. We'll begin harvesting these potatoes in August.

We desperately need your help to weed the onions this week!

This week's workshift schedule:

Bring gloves, water, a hat, sturdy shoes, and a pad for kneeling (if necessary for you)!

We meet under the large red maple at the end of the barn by the pick up room.

Hosted by longtime member Gia Yaccarino on Saturday, June 25 at 12pm, and Sunday, June 26 at 12pm.

Maybe you are a new member, maybe you’ve been a member for a while. Either way – this workshop is for you!

In the barn, everything made sense while you were putting your share into your bags to bring home. At home, it suddenly became very overwhelming once you began unpacking! We have all been there; it is part of the CSA learning curve.

Let us help you make the most of your farm share!

Being a member of a CSA opens the door to so many topics! At this workshop we will talk about:

- Resources: books, websites, Anchor Run CSA website (Recipes and Veggies 202 – it has pictures)

- How to keep your veggies as fresh as possible once they are in your refrigerator.

- The pros and cons of different preservation techniques (freezing, fermenting, canning, dehydrating).

- “Tools of the trade” which I find invaluable.

- Before you compost: radish greens are edible!

- Composting, composting at the farm, what and what not to include in a compost pile, vermicomposting.

- Solar Cooking

We will share recipes based on farm produce that our families love. And by share – I mean taste and provide copies of the recipes. Pestos - don’t limit yourself to Basil. What to do with all those greens? Veggie Hash! The list goes on! This is a casual, enlightening event that will enhance your experience of the CSA. Hope to see you there!