East Liberty Market and CSA pickup – CANCELED FOR JULY 4th (normally: Monday 3:30 – 6:30 – at the new Liberty Green Park). We’ll add on an extra week at the end of the season for folks who missed this pickup. If you were scheduled to pick up tomorrow – we’ll see you on the 18th
CSA pick up Week #5 (odd weeks)
Click here to shop our web-store – New! Pickled Garlic Scapes!
If you want eggs – especially if you’d like us to bring them to the markets – please order them online! This is also a great way to guarantee that you’ll get chicken, pork roasts, or other specific cuts from our freezers – as we bring a limited variety of meats for retail to the markets.
The next round of pigs have been shipped off to the butcher and we expect our freezers to be restocked in a couple weeks. We’ll shout out and celebrate when they are full again!
Where to find us?!
The Farm – WEDNESDAY (11 – 7).
Northside – Friday 3 – 7 farmers market in Allegheny Commons.
Mt Lebanon Uptown Market – Saturday 9-12
Squirrel Hill Market – Sunday 9 – 1 at the Beacon/Bartlett Parking Lot
East Liberty Market – CANCELED FOR 4th OF JULY (normally: Monday 3:30 – 6:30 – at the new Liberty Green Park). We’ll add on an extra week at the end of the season for folks who missed this pickup.
Forth of July celebration:
Join in the community celebration and bring some fireworks to share, Monday July 4th! We have a few boxes of bigger fireworks on hand. Come to the farm for a low key (but still quite nice) fireworks show and bonfire. We’re going to get out the grill. BYOB, make it a picnic (and/or) potluck and enjoy the evening, starting around 4 pm. Fireworks will start at dusk (9ish). Bring a camp chair or blanket and bug spray!
Field Update – by jen
Boy it’s dry out there. We’re irrigating on a daily basis and things still aren’t growing particularly quickly. We watched Friday night’s storm on the radar and in the distant horizon. The clouds parted just above Fawn Township and went north and south of the farm, leaving us dry as a bone. We have the beets and carrots well watered and the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, tomatillos, cucumbers and squash all mulched (and watered). It’s just a matter of time and keeping ahead of the weeds!
To run the irrigation, I have to drive to the veggies fields and switch the filter to “waste”, then drive down our lane and connect the hose across the driveway. Then I go to the pump by the pond; drain the main line, fill the pump with gasoline, reconnect the mainline and start the pump (to get the water up to the field at the top of the hill). Then I hustle back out to the fields and switch the filter from “waste” to “rinse” and wait a minute, then switch it to “filter”. Then I walk around the fields checking and adjusting all the sprinklers and on/off valves. Most of the time there’s clogs, kinks, or holes which all need to be fixed for the irrigation to work properly. I let the pump run for about an hour and a half. Every half hour, I switch the on/off valves, so each section of the field gets watered, as the pump doesn’t have enough pressure to water all the crops at the same time. So…. there’s a day in the life of watering crops!
We will continue to bring in extra produce from the organic farmers up north. We plan to supplement the CSA with some squash and cucumbers. I know you’re reaching your limit on lettuce – but you’re going to miss it come mid-summer, when you’re back to wanting big salads with all those fresh cherry tomatoes! We keep seeding lettuce in the greenhouse and planting it in the fields, with the plan that conditions will be just right all summer long!
We’re trying out a couple new summer greens – Red Leaf Amaranth and Tokyo Bekana – both of which (apparently) hold up to the summer heat and pest pressure relatively well. They are just big enough to transplant into the fields – so a harvest in two more weeks would be reasonable.
The garlic should be bulbing up soon – but it’s been so dry, and it’s planted in a section of the fields that doesn’t get irrigation, so I’m not feeling confident that we’ll get nice sized garlic bulbs this year. Last fall we planted and then heavily mulched it with wood chips, so we’ve done good job with controlling the weed pressure. We also run the chicken tractors down the outside of the beds. We’re fertilizing next year’s garlic beds now. The Garlic Harvest is only a couple of weeks away!
We’re seeding fall crops in the greenhouse and are already thinking and planning for the fall harvest. Time flies!
