second community potluck in elmira

second community picnic scheduled for monday evening!  the first community picnic potluck was a big sucess, come join us for number 2!  starts once the farmers have loaded up from market 6:15/30ish.  bring a dish to pass and place to sit, we'll provide table wear, a grill, and nice people!  the picnic is after the grove park farmers market on the corner of 4th and walnut streets in elmira! 
liz (and matthew)

After we got some good rain a couple weeks ago, I really thought we would not have any trouble getting enough rain the rest of this season, but here we are again. I was hoping we would not have to use our pond anymore this year except for irrigating our hoophouse crops, but we have had to irrigate the last three evenings. It was nice to have a break from irrigating and the pond was holding out there for a couple weeks but now it is down a few more feet. This makes it hard on our new plantings of fall and winter crops like cabbage, beets, carrots and rutabegas.
But the chickens are safe for now. We closed them up in their coop Friday evening as we do each evening before we plan to move them the next morning. Its a good thing we did because Saturday morning when we were moving them, there was the hawk hanging around in the trees waiting for a chance to get its breakfast. So if we hadn't closed them in we probably would have lost more. So we moved them into our patch of dead raspberries. This gives them plenty of cover, lots to eat and provides fertility for these beds which we will convert to more space for vegetable crops next year.

lettuce mix

lettuce
pea shoots
sunflower shoots
squash and zucchini
parsley
potatoes
Swiss chard
kale
a few eggplant
tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
green beans
dragon tongue beans
tomatillos
peppers, green and ripe
garlic
carrots
beets
sweet onions
shallots
a few melons
eggs

We got another order of Farmer Ground Flour this week, but it is now only available in 5 lb. bags so if you want to take some for your share it will have to be equivalent of 2 items - sorry for the inconvenience. But we thought having 5 lb bags would be better than not having any.

Well I have been wondering when the first time would be that a predator struck our chickens. That happened to be this morning. I walked out this morning to feed and water them and I knew something was wrong when I got close and saw they were all under their coop when usually they are out roaming their yard. Then the hawk took flight. I don't know what species it was - but it was BIG and beautiful, of course. It had killed two hens and had eaten about half of one of them when I interrupted its breakfast. I hope the chickens are able to get under there coop faster next time the hawk comes around! Hopefully the two roosters are good watchchickens and will get better about sounding the alarm when a big bird is overhead. We will move them and their coop to a different location on the farm tomorrow morning in hope that that may help. Our flock now consists of 29 hens and 2 roosters.
Nevertheless, we do hope to have our first few dozen eggs available this week at market though they will be small pullet eggs. We probably will not bring any eggs to the Elmira market, as Heritage Pastures already has eggs to offer and we will not have that many. So probably we'll just bring them to Corning and maybe Watkins Glen Farmers' Markets - we'll just have to see how it goes though.
Our current plan is to offer eggs to the CSA as 1/2 dozen as 1 share item, but we will have to see how it works.

lettuce mix

lettuce

pea shoots
sunflower shoots
squash and zucchini
parsley
potatoes
Swiss chard
kale
a few eggplant
tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
green beans
dragon tongue beans
tomatillos
peppers, green and ripe
garlic
carrots
beets
cabbage
sweet onions
shallots
a few melons
eggs

A few green San Marzano paste tomatoes

These tomatoes are in our greenhouse and we think this might be the first time we've ever experienced a problem that we previously thought may be only mythical - too much nitrogen for tomatoes. The foliage is incredible on these plants with, so far, not many fruits.

lettuce mix

pea shoots
sunflower shoots
squash and zucchini
parsley
potatoes
Swiss chard
kale
leeks
eggplant
tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
green beans
dragon tongue beans
tomatillos
peppers
garlic
carrots
beets
cabbage
sweet onions
shallots
a few melons
edamame

yummy brownie recipe!

Black Bean Brownies recipe from Cayuga Pure Organics website.

Ingredients:
1 3/4 cup Well Cooked CPO Black Beans
3 Eggs
3/4 Cup Cane Sugar
2 1/2 tbl. Veggie Oil
1/4 Cup Cocoa Powder
1 1/4 tsp. Vanilla Extract
Orange Zest (optional)
Pinch of Salt
Directions:
1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2) Combine all ingredients in a blender or a food processor and blend well until smooth, scraping down the sides as needed.
3) Pour mixture into a greased 8"x8" baking dish.
4) Bake for about 30 minutes, until the top appears dry and starts to crack slightly
makes about 16 brownies

Our first egg arrived today! It will be a little while before there are enough to sell, but fun to see the beginning coming!

Midsummer is the hardest but best time for us to look around and start making plans and changes for next year. All we need to do is stroll through the vegetable beds with pen and paper and take notes of what's working and what's not, which varities are winners and which are lacking. But alas we don't usually make the time. And then by winter when we are planning and buying seeds the memories of all our brilliant ideas and the poor performing varieties from the summer are hazy or completely forgotten.
So I got inspired this past week during my weekly to-do list tour around the farm to also take notes for next year. I thought I would share a few of them here.

• All tomatoes grown indoors. This year we put most of our tomatoes in our hoophouses and they are great. We love them - they take more work pruning and trellising to keep them under control, but they have NO DISEASE. This compares to our field tomatoes which are always tortured by septoria and early blight and we often hardly get any crop out of them. And there's not really any organic treatment for these diseases. This is definitely a waste of valuable bedspace.
• Speaking of wasting valuable bedspace - we are pretty sure we are going to stop trying to grow peas and melons. Now you might think to yourself "I didn't know they grew either of those crops?" Exactly! We have put up a valiant effort trying to get these crops to grow and produce a decent yield for us over the years. While some crops might have a poor yield in a particular year, these two are perennial poor performers for us. Peas seem like we grow them just so they can die on us. And melons just do not make any kind of economic sense to grow. We continued growing them the the last few years because we felt they were a treat for the CSA members. But with such low yields we can't keep doing it.
• We tried this year putting insect netting on the new hoophouse to keep out the cucmber beetles (which along with flea beetles are our most challenging pests). But they were already in the soil so they still ended up decimating our precious cucmbers inside. So I think we'll not have cucmbers in the hoophouse next year and instead have one more indoor bed for the aforementioned tomatoes.
• Putting tomato cages around the tomatillos worked great! And because we can now walk down the row harvesting them we spend a little less time on our hands and knees which is basically our never-ending quest.

Well I've got lots more nuggets but thats probably enough detailed farm-geek information for you to take in in one shot.

lettuce mix

pea shoots
sunflower shoots
squash and zucchini
parsley
potatoes
Swiss chard
kale
leeks
eggplant
tomatoes
cherry tomatoes
green beans
dragon tongue beans
tomatillos
peppers
garlic
carrots
beets
cabbage
sweet onions
shallots
a few melons

next week - probably the same