A crew trimming the garlic plants down to plain bulbs without roots and stem!
This week's offerings: New vegetables include onions (this week white ones!), red cabbage, yellow onions, and carrots, (along with 10 other items). As usual, what any one tote includes depends on what size share it would be (with the smaller shares usually getting about 8 items, the large share 14-15 items, and the medium share halfway in between!), the quantity of the vegetable that we have ready to be included, as well as the chosen preferences of each of the vegetables. Sometimes there will extras of a particular vegetable, which would be available for swapping, or purchasing; sometimes not, as many of you now know! Carrots are on the small side, as they were seeding too thickly, and it was not time-efficient to try to thin them out. (We seeded them super early in the spring, hoping to get some early carrots, and because of the cold temps at that time of year, we overseeded them (i.e. planted extra seeds), expecting more not to germinate because of the less-than-ideal conditions. But alas, they almost all came up, and thus we have too many carrots per square inch of row space!) But still usable! The second planting of green beans overlaps slightly with the first planting, so we have some extra beans if anyone would be interested in purchasing some extra pounds of them. This week's celery will probably be the last until mid-to-late fall.
Coming soon: Looks like the first planting of sweet corn may be maturing in about two weeks. Other onions besides this week's white onions (yellow, and red) will be appearing regularly from now on as well. Tomatoes turning color, and should be available for the next couple months. New plantings of zucchini and cucumbers will keep those vegetables coming, too! Peppers, eggplant, and melons still a ways off.
Organic blueberries from Michigan: Sometimes our orders from fruit orchards get to be too large for some farms to be able to fulfill, and this was the case for the organic blueberries we had been getting from Flyte Family Farm near Coloma, so this year we are turning to the organic blueberry farm in Michigan called Better Way Farms, which supplies numerous outlets with their organic blueberries throughout the midwest. Look soon for a link to order if you would be interested in them! (Like the cherries, it will be a Barn2Door link, and will not be available through the Harvie platform.) We like to support other local farms, especially if organic, and we like to purchase such things for our own family, so we are happy to coordinate the shipping to get them to you as well. They will be available only in 10 lb. boxes, though, which we acknowledge is probably a larger volume than what some of you would choose!
Keep on the lookout for alternatives to plastic! We realize that we use a lot of plastic bags in our attempts to deliver to you the vegetables in as good a condition as possible, though if there was an alternative out there, we would try it (or them) out. During the season we need to stay focused on the planting, weeding, irrigating, and harvesting of the items destined for your totes, so are not staying in touch with what the packaging industry is coming up with by way of alternatives to polyethylene bags. But if you come across something in your own travels and food purchasing that you think we should know about, please let us know!
Wishing you all a pleasant week!
Peter & Bernadette
