Copy
Week Fourteen Newsletter
View this email in your browser

The frost has come.

There is a saying, 'may the frost come late enough that you reap the benefits of your hard work, but soon enough that you don't break your back.'

I think about this saying everything I think of the frost. It is always a milestone on the farm, and we experienced our first light frost early Saturday morning. It's always bittersweet- marking the end of many crops and signifying an end to the summer, but the beginning of fall. The reason the frost is such a big deal on the farm is because plant tissue is made up primarily of water-and we all know what happens when we put a sealed waterbottle into a freezer-the water expands as it turns into ice and the waterbottle explodes. Hopefully it's not a glass waterbottle! The same happens in each individual cell of the plant tissue. As the temperature drops and the water turns to ice, the cell bursts, thus killing the leaf.

But not all crops die in the frost! Many plants have adapted to live in cooler climates. More on those later...Crops that are susceptible to the frost are the cucurbits (summer squash, melons, winter squash, cucumbers) solenaceous (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant), and others like beans, and some herbs. We were able to cover some of these crops with floating row cover, which is basically a sheet that we drape over the crop to provide a few degrees of protection. It worked! We were able to save the beans and peppers through this frost. We don't have one in the next 10 day forecast.

The picture on the right is before the frost, and on the left is a photo from after the frost. You can see the browning of the plants on the right as a result of the frost. Once the leaf is dead, the fruit doesn't have any more solar panels to make food for it! But don't worry, in the case of the winter squash, we can still harvest it.
I am thankful to have had many wonderful volunteers come out and help at the farm this week with dry bean harvest, processing of onions, detrellising of tomatoes, and acorn squash harvest. 

Results are in, my achilles tendon is completely torn and I will be having surgery in the next week or two. It's a bummer to not be able to do the work I'd like to do on the farm, but things are still going well out at Seeds despite the injury. We'll always welcome volunteers if you'd like to come out to the farm and play in the soil!
Other things we've been doing this week are cover cropping, harvesting pigs (i.e. bringing them to the butcher), covering crops for the frost, and processing of storage crops
In your box this week you'll find:
beet
melons
salad mix
arugula
radish
leek
red potato
summer squash
herb
peppers
flower
swiss chard
red onion
yellow onion
summer squash
herbs
I was scouring for the best recipe for potato leek soup, and I think I landed on it by Ina Garten, check it out: 
 http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/roasted-potato-leek-soup-recipe.html
Copyright © 2014 Seeds Farm, All rights reserved.


unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences 

Email Marketing Powered by Mailchimp