Technical glitch...

Hello all,

Our regularly scheduled posting has been delayed for a day or so due to a minor technical problem. We'll have new pictures up shortly. Thanks!

Bugs

August is bug season on the farm. We see bugs everywhere, we feel them biting and nibbling on us while we work and we hear the cicadas constantly. When you spend as many hours outdoors as we do you get used to bugs everywhere. We are happy to see many of our bugs because they help keep our pest bug population in check. Some bugs though we are happy to see simply because of their beauty. Such is the case with these butterflies that love the flower field!


On the other hand when we find tomatoes that look like this we know that tomato hornworms have arrived.


These guys demolish tomato plants. Fortunately a parasitic wasp also likes the hornworms. In fact it uses the hornworm to feed its larvae. Here is a tomato hornworm with parasitic wasp larvae on its back.


It may seem gross but I'd much rather see this than to have to spend my time spraying our organic control for the tomato hornworms.

As far as our crops are concerned we've got lots of beans coming into production. We've got fresh green beans in addition to these edible soybeans (also known as edamame). They have a very loyal following among some of our customers, but we had to scale back our planting a bit this year because we ended up with more edamame than we knew what to do with last year!


Of course everyone knows how to enjoy these wonderful French fillet beans. Young and tender they only need to be cooked for a couple of minutes. We are at the end of our first planting of these beans, but we have another planting that will mature later in September.


Finally come the middle of August we've got whole fields that need to be cleaned up. This is where we have grown many of our crops over the past couple of months. They have all been mowed and tomorrow this field should be tilled and prepared for its fall cover crop of oats and tillage radish.

Tomatoes!

We had our first good size tomato harvest this week. Back in May/June when we were waiting, impatiently, for our field to dry out and the tomatoes were growing taller and taller in their little cells there were moments that I thought we might not get to harvest tomatoes this year! We like to grow a number of heirloom varieties. These are tomato varieties that have been saved and passed down from year to year, oftentimes for their individual characteristics, as opposed to bred and hybridized selectively by researchers or seed companies. So heirloom tomato plants produce tomatoes that look and taste nothing like grocery store tomatoes. On the other hand they are more susceptible to variations in weather and disease pressure. This year our heirlooms are splitting like crazy. This is usually the result of uneven watering that has been exacerbated by the fact that the weather has been consistently hot and humid. Enough talk about tomatoes, now let's meet some of our heirlooms!



These three are our small tomatoes. From left to right we've got garden peach, green zebra and black trifele. Garden peach is juicy and sweet with just a little fuzz (hence its name) on the outside. Green zebra has a strong flavor that lends itself well to salads, or to being sliced and added to a grilled cheese sandwich. Finally black trifele is a new tomato for us this year, and like other dark tomatoes it has a rich, sweet flavor.



These light-colored, large heirlooms are called (again from left to right) great white, goldie, and copia. Great white is a new tomato that we tried this year because the yellow tomato that we usually grow (Lillian's yellow) was unavailable this year. These are mild and juicy tomatoes that are ripe when the bottom just begins to blush. Goldie is turning out to be one of our favorite heirlooms because it hardly cracks! This meaty tomato also has a great taste and texture that make it ideal for sandwiches or burgers. Finally, copia is one of our mottled tomatoes that is a stunning mix of yellow and red. We usually grow a variety called striped german, but didn't get any planted this year due to a couple of issues with potting mix and the weather. Copia is a similar tomato to striped german and is also great for sandwiches.



Some heirlooms look pretty close in terms of color to your "regular" red tomatoes. These are brandywine and cherokee purple (the two tomatoes in the top row are brandywines and the bottom row are cherokee purples). The tomatoes on the left are the less ripe version of each variety of tomato. Both of these tomatoes are requested by name each year at our market stand. Brandywines are sweet and juicy with a very thin skin that makes them great for eating on salads or simply sliced on a plate with a little bit of salt. Cherokee purples are dark, meaty and flavorful. Even in a good year they crack all over so it is not surprising that many of ours are cracked again this year.



Finally, we've got two different types of hybrid tomatoes. The dark red tomatoes (top row) are big beefs which are consistent, hold up well and taste great. The lighter pink tomatoes are, appropriately, pink beauties. They are just a bit juicier than big beef with a slightly thinner skin. We hope that you will enjoy all of these tomato varieties this season!

How to enjoy an onion

We always try to get Evan to eat new vegetables as they come into season. This week we pulled our onion crop so he set about to learn how to eat an onion. Apparently they are best when shaken...


Then enjoyed raw and muddy.


After his onion snack Evan could help me unload a tiller that we bought. It became evident this spring that we needed a bigger, heavier tiller to prepare the ground more quickly between rains. So we finally received the tiller that was ordered back in June. I knew that the semi wouldn't make it into our driveway so I backed our pickup truck up to the semi and slid the 700 pound tiller down a homemade ramp into the pickup bed. All went well and after a couple of days of set-up and adjustments I was working some ground this morning.



By the afternoon we had flowers planted in the ground that I had just worked! Apparently we just can't plant enough flowers. This picture was snapped at 10AM at our Saturday Market.










This picture was taken at 11AM on the same Saturday. Each bouquet needs to be wrapped after being sold so Emily was busy during that hour.











Finally here's a picture that you won't often see in Ohio. Corn on driptape! Since we didn't get our corn planted until mid-July we need to be able to help it through the hot and dry August days.

The tomatoes are almost here.

We've learned that one shouldn't make prognostications when farming, but I'll go out on a limb and say that we're looking forward to a good tomato season on the farm. You can see that they are starting to go from green to red.


We've been harvesting sungold cherry tomatoes and Juliette saladette tomatoes (the smaller tomatoes are usually the first to ripen). They are definitely a treat at this point in the season and the sungold tomatoes are so fragile (shortly after a rain I've watched them split while carrying them up to the barn!) that you probably won't find them anyplace except directly from a farmer who grows them.







As you can see we've been busy tying up the tomatoes to keep their vines off the ground in an attempt to keep the plants healthy. Pretty soon though we're going to run out of stake to tie up the plants.

Meanwhile the chickens keep laying their eggs though they definitely don't like the hot weather. Egg production will drop a bit in hot weather (since we don't have an air conditioned coop) because the chickens don't like to eat as much when it is hot outside. In this picture our very helpful intern Ali is carrying the eggs from the coop to the barn where we will box them up and put them in the fridge.






In the flower field Lisianthus is just beginning to bloom. This delicate flower is enjoyed by Emily and the bees alike.



The barn is also finished being painted. We've had the barn fixed (there were some rotten timbers that resulted from a missing ro0f), a new roof put on, and had the barn painted by Jim Wilson. He's a carpenter who specializes in historic preservation and timber frame buildings, and we certainly like what he's done with the barn. Every farm needs a good barn and now we're happy to show off ours.



Finally, the sun sets and moon rises on another week at Mile Creek Farm.

It's not a dry heat.

I spent eight years of my childhood in Arizona where the temperature on a July day was normally well over 100 degrees, but as they say at least it was a dry heat. This year in Ohio it is definitely a wet heat. So, though we're used to working outside in all kinds of weather we've found this summer to be particularly uncomfortable. Additionally there are a lot of things that haven't worked out as we'd planned on the farm this year so we're usually pretty tired when we come inside and fortunately being greeted by the following scene helps us forget for a bit all the work there is to do.



Some of that work that we've gotten done this past week includes weeding the newly planted corn. Being primarily a farmer and secondarily a blogger I didn't think to take a before and after picture, but if you replace all the dirt that you can see with little green weeds then you'll have an idea of what the field looked like before I went through it with the wheel hoe.




Our very helpful crew of dedicated workers cleaned up these bean beds this morning. These are "fancy" French filet beans. They are long, slender and a real treat even though their smaller size makes the harvest take longer than it does with other beans.






Even though it went in much later than it should have the winter squash is starting to fill in its beds. Another couple of weeks and it will hopefully have most of the field covered with vines and little baby squash.



The zinnias are finally starting to bloom. Emily is very committed to cutting her flowers at the ideal time so fast-opening flowers like zinnias and sunflowers need to be cut every day. Add it to the to-do list!



We've found that most people either love okra or really dislike it, but even if you don't like the wonderfully slimy vegetable, maybe you can appreciate the flowering plant!

Last Thursday was our CSA member fieldwalk. Fortunately the thunderstorm that blew through minutes before everyone arrived did not dump much rain on us. And we were rewarded with this view of a rainbow.






With cooperative weather the last couple of weeks we've run through a lot of our planting that had been piling up.


Now the greenhouse is pretty much done for the year. Of course we do still have fall broccoli to plant.



In the fields the peppers are just beginning to grow. Within a month we'll have to stake and tie up these guys because they get so heavy with peppers that they will fall over in a thunderstorm. At the same time as the peppers, tomatoes and eggplants are just beginning to produce, we are also seeding fall crops.


Under the white fabric row cover we've got a type of rutabaga that we're trying this year. We also seeded some sweet corn in this field. I know that everyone around here probably will think we are crazy for seeding it so late, but we just haven't been able to work up enough of the fields until now to get it planted. We'll put it on drip irrigation and we should have corn in mid-September.We haven't really grown much sweet corn the last couple of years because we really don't have the space to grow enough of it for the CSA and/or market, but we were determined to get some planted this year.

Finally after all of the harvest and CSA preparation was done yesterday I looked in the cooler at our air conditioner that we've modified to cool our homemade walk-in cooler down into the thirties (here's a link for more info on the coolbot that allows us to do this) and it was completely frozen over!



This is a nightmare situation for us because it means that suddenly the cooler won't get any colder than 65 degrees which is much too warm. After a couple of hours of manually defrosting the air conditioner every twenty minutes with the fan and/or a blow drier, I finally found the loose connection and was able to get it fixed in time to get to bed before midnight!