Plum Harvest!

 

We have plums!  Remember when friends helped clear the blackberry from the back of the farm in December 2011? [See the photos in A Brief Tour of Habitat Farm, Spring 2012.]  Well, it turns out all that blackberry had been choking out plum trees that have been there for generations.  After we gave them room to breathe, they returned the favor by giving us fruit!  

Heaping half-pint containers like the one you see in the photo are going for just $2 each right now.  We're selling them by volume (as many as will fit in one of these little containers for two bucks), but just to give you an idea, the half-pint container in the photo is holding 10.75oz of plums--2/3 of a pound-- so at $3 per pound you could fill up on plums for canning, jamming, and dehydrating.  (Which is what we plan to do with whatever's left over.)  Just send us an email to let us know when it would be convenient for you to come get some!  

There's plenty more than what we harvested today, as you can see from the photo below:

Potato Harvest.

 

We harvested these potatoes on August 25th, 2013.  This is a variety called Red Lasoda that we found at Naomi's Organic Farm Supply.  We harvested the entire row (roughly 15'), 12 plants, because the plants were diseased, or had succumbed to a pest.  The leaves were riddled with little holes, and the plants were stunted--barely 6" tall in most cases.  They also had not matured like potatoes normally would: flowering, then dropping their flowers and drying out.  Still, they formed a good amount of beautiful tubers, with pristine, bright, rosy-red skins and creamy white flesh.  (They're still covered with dirt in the above photo.)  And they taste great!  The skins are very thin, so we are treating them as new potatoes.  But for around $7 investment in the Red Lasoda potato seed this past spring, while we didn't get the crop we had hoped for, we at least feel we got our money's worth. 

[Note: the $7 is a rough estimate.  We spent $20.93 in March on 3.22 lbs of potato seed of various types, including German Butterball (sown under cover on March 27th), Red Lasoda (sown April 28th), and French Fingerling (sown June 2nd).]

Here are a couple of our Red Lasodas all washed up and ready for cooking:

Eggplant Harvest.

We harvested these eggplants on August 16th, 2013, from about 24 plants.  Our eggplants are spaced at 1.5 foot spacing over two rows totaling 32 feet.  Half of the plants were started indoors on March 23rd; the other half were started a bit later, on April 6th.  By now, the plants are about 2' tall, and producing decently-sized fruit.  This variety is one we found through Kitazawa Seeds, called Ping Tung Long.

At Rest for the Winter.

Hey, thanks for staying in touch!  It's winter here on the farm, but we're still harvesting a few things for ourselves (leeks, rutabagas, carrots, spinach, tatsoi, kale, celery, and herbs) through the frost and snow. This time of year, plant growth can't really keep up with the amount of harvest we'd need to continue our CSA through the winter.

We've been using the down time to plan out next year's seed order and crop successions, and to plan out the coming season's CSA.  Want to get in on some Habitat Farm produce in 2013?  We'd love to keep you in the loop; simply send us an email to let us know you're interested.

We've also been using this time to digest our personal experience with Habitat Farm--now just one season in (Fall 2011-Fall 2012).  We're already inspired by this experience and coming up with new ideas for the farm in 2013!

A September 20th share.

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A September 13th share.

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A September 6th share.

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An August 30th share.

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An August 23rd share.

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And here's a photo of the carrots sent in by one of our CSA members:

An August 16th share.

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An August 9th share.

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An August 2nd share.

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A June 24th share.

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A June 17th share.

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A June 10th share.

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A June 3rd share.

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A May 27th share.

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Rest in peace Moonbeam.

This past Thursday we lost one of our hens: mean ole' Moonbeam. True to her character, she didn't go down without a fight; she hung in for about a week battling a condition that caused fluid to pool up in her abdomen.  Moonbeam earned her name for being the sweetest little chick we'd ever met.  Then somewhere along the way, as she grew up, she developed a bad streak that lent her a depth of character any chicken would envy.  (In the photo below, Moonbeam is the chick on the far left, no stripe.)

This sad loss offers us a reminder of the extent to which hens are givers: they pour so much life and energy into making eggs, nearly one a day, which they must then labor to pass.  With so much of themselves going into their eggs and out into the world, they are truly generous creatures.  Moonbeam, too, was such a saint--albeit with a rough edge all around.  Her quirks, her pecks to the back of our calves, and her unique personality will live on in our memory.  

We'll miss you Moonbeam! The coop just won't be the same without you.

A May 20th share.

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An eight-egg day.