Muddy Fingers Farm Newsletter: CSA right around the corner now...

Hello friends of the farm, I hope the spring is treating you well. It has been a weather rollercoaster around here. We’ve had heat, we’ve had cold, we’ve had rain, and we’ve had none, it seemed that we would have to be watering back in late April until the rain started coming reliably and so much so that we have had trouble getting in to till the soil. In all weather fun, we even had our first hail storm! NO damage, so don’t worry, it would have been funny to see us from the outside of the house, noses pressed against the window as we watched those little pellets fly. It was the longest minute of the day, but we made it!

Speaking of dramatic weather, we were away for the night on Friday to go to the memorial service for Matthew’s beloved grandfather. Our neighbors were kind enough to water our greenhouse and care for the farm. We had no idea that there would be a windstorm with 40+ mile per hour gusts. One or more of which took the top right off of our greenbarn! (Our greenhouse that is used like a barn) Our neighbor was kind enough to pick up everything in the building that would get ruined by being rained on, it was so nice to come home and find every single tool and cardboard box safely stored in our walk in cooler, where it would stay dry.

And speaking of normal weather, worry not about the frosts and even snow flurries of the last few nights. We certainly have lots of plants in the ground and the only ones that could be harmed by a frost are the few rows of the earliest potatoes that are up six inches tall. We covered them last night, but even if they do freeze, they will regrow, but we would like them as early as possible, so we don’t want to lose them.

This is a busy week, we are glad to be hosting two high school groups and to be speaking at a middle school career day all through the career development council. It is really gratifying to have farming be considered a career that we may want to introduce our youngsters to. With the average age of farmer’s today being well in the 50s, we will be glad to have young people entering farming in the future.

For those members who pick up in Elmira, we hope you will be excited to see the farmer’s market that will be happening in Grove park on Monday evenings. While we have not technically received permission for the market yet, at this moment we are just waiting for the paperwork from a few of the farms to get turned into the city. We will let you know when it is official, but for now, we have ourselves, a flower vendor (corning and WG members will recognize Christina from high meadow flower farm from those markets), an egg and meat vendor, a fruit and veggie vendor, and just today we talked to a food vendor who expressed interest, we’ll see how it pans out. We had asked an ice cream vendor but it doesn’t seem that they will be attending.

We’re thinking tomatoes right now, we spent a little while tonight potting up our plants into larger cells. Last year we tried grafting our favorite tasty heirloom varieties onto disease resistant root stock, but did a poor job of it. This year we tried again and achieved much more success, not a 100% success rate, but far better than last time. When we first attached the tasty variety on the top of the disease resistant bottom, they were very wilted and looked like there was no chance that they could live (see photo) many or most of them took and now they are growing on top of totally new roots- amazing!

Speaking of tomatoes, we will plan to do some transplanting of them at the May 22^nd CSA get together, hope you can make it, we will be starting with a potluck at noon followed by a tour and a little transplanting.