Hay! Ewe! Root for the Farmers!: June 20-24

Let's put the cool video first, eh?

This shot is from behind a basket weeder on a International Harvester Cub. You can see "shovels" behind the wheels of the tractor--they dig up weeds and compressed soil. The baskets are these spinning "hamster cage" pieces on the "belly bar" Belly bar is the name for site for hooking up an implement under the engine of the tractor. It is nice to have the weeding happen there because the tractor driver (me!) needs to make sure the baskets are spinning along the ground, pulling out the weeds and NOT pulling out the golden beets planted here.

Harvest and a Field Walk.

Mondays and Wednesdays are harvest days here at Maggie's Farm. We start our work an hour earlier to take advantage of the morning coolness. The pattern has been, for the first few weeks, get in and cut the mesclun greens and get them back to the wash-up room in the barn. We wash the plants, not because they are especially dirty and certainly not because they contaminated with any chemicals. We wash them to cool them down as water cools the plant more quickly than the air. Once they are washed, we box them up for delivery. On Mondays, we box for the CSA Market delivery which means we box same vegetables in crates with enough quantity that each of our Iggy's Bread Tuesday pick up customers will be able to choose the vegetables they would like for the week within the limit of what we have. On Wednesdays, we package up some individual shares to be collected at Athena Healthcare in Cambridge and then we take a large selection of our veggies to the Belmont Farmer's Market.

Brian, harvesting kale

Garlic scapes

Beets need weeding.

We also have a field walk in the vegetable beds each week. We are looking for signs of insect pressure, ripeness and disease that might be creeping up on us. The potato plants were attracting their fair share of insects.