Final Share

Thank you for joining the CSA this season. We really do appreciate your support and hope you enjoyed the vegetables you received from us this year.

Everything in this week’s share except for the mini pumpkins was from our farm. The share included mustard, Asian greens mix, kale, turnips, radishes, green peppers and sweet potatoes.

Soon we will send out a web-based survey so you can send us comments about the CSA. The farm and CSA are very much a work in progress. We have come a long way since we started eight years ago but we are still learning as farmers and know we can make improvements to the farm and CSA.

Over all we think we had a good year. The one major disappointment this year was that the tomato blight epidemic reduced our tomato yield substantially. We usually have a bonanza of tomatoes. This season pretty much every organic farm on the east coast was struck by the blight so I don’t think I could have done anything more to save them. I fought for every tomato we harvested and spent more time than I want to add up spraying organic fungicides.

The tomatoes in our plastic covered tunnel did much better than those outside. We have ordered another 20 feet by 96 feet tunnel to put up this fall. It should come in the next few weeks. Several people have mentioned they would like to help with this and I will follow up with you about coming out to lend a hand.

This year we grew a greater diversity of crops than before and started working with a few additional local farmers to increase the diversity of the shares. I think the diversity made up some for the small amount of tomatoes. Next year we plan to concentrate on growing some things we have not yet grown such as beets, carrots and different types of greens.

Now is the time to clean up the farm, rest a little and start building greenhouses, raised beds and other infrastructure for next season. I’m already enjoying spending more time with the boy Ezra. Monday was the first time he helped a little on the farm. We did not ask him to help. He walked up to the large container where we wash greens and started to put handfuls into a box like he sees me doing. I have seen on the Mennonite farms that children want to help out as soon as they can. Now the challenge for me is to not somehow mess up that natural inclination.

Next season we are going to scale back the CSA a little from 100 to 80 shares. With an infant and a toddler, next season is a good time for us to have a somewhat smaller CSA. Also, sometimes this season I could not fit everything on one truck and had to hire neighbors to drive second trucks. With 60 members on the Hill, I should be able to do everything with one truck. Prices will be the same and shares will most likely be larger with less shares.

We have other changes in mind. Most importantly we are going to offer discounts to members who can help at pickup each. Just having one other person at pickup makes things go much better. We’ll send out an email about signing up for 2010 around Thanksgiving with all the details and changes large and small.

Thank you again for your support this season.

Scott and Tanya

Ezra in puppy custome helping wash greens

CSA Update

We hope you enjoyed your shares this week. This week’s share had plenty of cooking greens. The Asian greens, winter squash, beans and white Japanese turnips were grown by us organically.

We are very pleased with the pole bean crop so far. Some pictures of the three rows of healthy beans are here on the blog, along with one picture of the farm taste tester approving of the Italian pole beans. The beans have climbed the trellis to over six feet. Some must be close to eight feet. Thanks to CSA members who helped put up the trellis. Pole beans are a lot of work compared to bush beans but picking them is much easier because you do not have to bend down.

Bo Davis the maverick farmer by us in Prince George’s county grew the collards. Bo and his brother farm a piece of land surrounded by ugly subdivisions even closer to the city than us. They had to spray the collards once three weeks ago.

Ronald Zimmerman grew the kale and radishes. The kale was sprayed once a month or so ago and the radishes were not sprayed at all. Henry Stauffer came thru with some quality red peppers for us. Some years we have plenty of red peppers in the fall but this year our peppers peaked early than got covered in morning glory, the arch enemy of all organic farmers. For the most part we have kept morning down with good cultivation. To just lose one crop a year to the vine is not that bad.

Next week there will be no pickup on the Hill due to the Jewish holiday Monday. We thought things thru and considering that we can not work at all Sunday evening or Monday, it’s just easier to skip the week and let things grow more. There will be a pickup Wednesday for the members who pick up on the farm porch. We’ll send out reminders about this.

See you on Monday October 5 on the Hill,

Scott and Tanya

Korean Mint (Agastache rugosa)

Many of you picked up “Korean mint” with your shares at Christ Church. Korean mint is native to China, Korea, Japan, and Siberia. It’s also known as blue licorice, Indian mint, and purple giant hyssop. It has been a big hit with the Jug Bay bees! They love hanging out on the long cones of small, purple flowers. We offered everyone a nibble of the leaves, which have a sweet, licorice flavor. Comments from tasters ranged from “wow” to “interesting” to “I’m not a fan of licorice”.

What to do with your handful? Many suggestions were offered: Muddle in the bottom of a glass for a mojito or old fashioned. Steep in hot water for tea (or add to iced tea). Chiffonade the leaves and toss them with chopped melon.

I thought it would make an amazing ice cream. If you have an ice cream maker, find the manufacturer’s recipe for basic vanilla ice cream. Substitute the mint leaves for the vanilla (or add them along with). Chop or tear them if you choose.

If you don’t have an ice cream maker, go get one. I’ll guarantee you there’s at least one in some Freecycler’s basement. Not only can you make homemade ice cream, you can turn all those lovely melons and watermelons into sorbet!

Posted by Jess Chaiken, the woman who can’t stop talking about food at the weekly pickup!

CSA Update and This Season’s Product Endorsements

We hope you are enjoying your shares this week. Our neighbor in Prince George’s County, Joe Goldsmith grew the corn and most of the banana peppers. Everything else, the basils, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, potatoes, cherry tomatoes and chard , was grown organically by us.

Ok it was technically not chard in your share this week. That green is called Perpetual Spinach. It is actually more similar to chard than spinach. Perpetual refers to its ability to continue to send up new shoots after you cut all the leaves. It’s not the tastiest green but holds holds up better than almost any other green mid-summer.

Jug Bay Market Garden extends its appreciation to everyone who helped harvesting this week’s share. Sunday a brave team of CSA members volunteered to help harvest potatoes despite the forecasts of strong showers. On Monday we got a big helping hand from the sisters Katrin and Julie Weiss. If you have any time to help out on the farm or at pickup, just let us know. Even an hour or two is a big help.

We have reached the mid-way point of the 20 week CSA season. Pretty soon farm management will send out the schedule for the second half of the season. What I can leak out now is that there will be no CSA pickup the week of Labor Day (September 7) or the week of Columbus Day on October 12th. Each year we skip some weeks when a lot of people tend to go out of town or when we are between seasons. Most likely we will skip another week sometime when we do not have much to harvest. The week of August 24th is a possibility. Many a CSA family is on vacation at that time and we may be between crops than. We will let you know by mid-August about this. Either way, the CSA will end sometime in early November.

Wednesday I went on a tour of One Straw Farm near Baltimore. One Straw is the largest and most successful organic farm in Maryland with a CSA of 1,600 shares. I learned a lot from seeing their equipment and growing methods. On the tour, we saw that late blight destroyed the the farm’s 5 acres of tomatoes. This softened the blow some of losing so many of our tomatoes to the fungus. Drew Norman is of One Straw is the best organic farmer around. He sprays the most effective organic sprays and does so even more systematically than us. If he could not keep the wicked blight off, we did not stand a chance.

So far, we still have some tomatoes alive and doing pretty well in the field. We are spraying them with a few organic fungicides that are mildly effective against blight. Whether these fields will be lucky enough not to have a lot of blight spores blew into them will determine the outcome. Knock on wood, the tomatoes in the greenhouse look beautiful and have started to ripen. This fall, we are going put up several more greenhouses. Most years organic tomatoes just do so much better in them because they stay drier and hotter during cool weather. Lots of steel and plastic unfortunately seems to be the only way to do without conventional fungicides in the humid east coast.

Enough about late blight. Mid-season is traditionally the time when Jug Bay Market Garden makes endorsements of products and other things we like. Unlike, “mommy bloggers” who pretend not to be paid by the manufacturers whose products they praise we receive no money or other rewards from those we endorse.

1. Best poison ivy treatment? No contest here. Jug Bay endorses Techno. Both the wash you put use after exposure and the scrub are the only over the counter products that work.

2. Place for coffee on the Hill? Peregrine Coffee near Eastern Market. CSA member Ryan Jensen operates the coffee house and is committed to serving high quality fair trade coffee.

3. Best varieties of lettuce. Move over old Buttercrunch. Tropicana and Magenta. The big heads this spring proved that these two are real winners in the mid-Atlantic.

4. Jug Bay Market Garden endorses Christ Church as the place to bring your young family if you are looking for a church. Regardless of which side of the Protestant Revolution you fall, you can feel at home there. Plus, the wonderful church was shipped over intact from the English countryside at great expense years back. How cool is that.

5. With equal fervor, Jug Bay Market Garden endorses the Hill Havurah as the place to be Jewish on the Hill. The era of the brick and mortal shul is over. The same goes for the era of different movements. Havurahs are the future and the Hill Havurah is a very fine one.

6. Jug Bay Market Garden endorses a “radical leftwing” publically funded health care program akin to ones in places run by conservative governments like Germany, France and Canada. The current employer-based health care system in our nation hampers both micro and big businesses. Many a family dirt farm like ours or other small business is held back by high insurance costs. The American steel and manufacturing as well cannot compete with foreign companies that don’t have to pay for employee health benefits.

7. Female vocalist of the year: Regina Spector. We are a little biased toward high-strung Russian Jews with brooding eyebrows but Regina is a very entertaining new talent.

8. Lastly and ever political, Jug Bay Market Garden once again endorses Ron Paul for president. He had no chance of winning in 2008 so it is no less meaningless to endorse him now that the election is long over. As we explained last fall, this endorsement is solely based on the fact he was the only candidate to show up at the farm office for an endorsement interview. Our endorsement bylaws state that we can only endorse someone who comes to the interview. We are still grateful for him appreciating the power of a small organic dirt farm to influence people at the polls. Plus he chose not to sue the farm after the two of us got into a wrestling match when the interview went awry. Thank you Ron Paul.

There you have Jug Bay Market’s endorsements for the year. Do with them what you wish.

We hope you enjoy your shares this week,

Scott and Tanya

CSA REPORT!

We hope you are enjoying your shares this week. We grew the eggplant, tomatoes, basil, potatoes and garlic organically on our farm. Our neighbor Joe Goldsmith grew the corn and watermelon conventionally down the road from us in gorgeous Prince George’s County.

The eggplant produced surprisingly well this week. I thought they were a few weeks off. When we looked under the leaves on Monday morning we found plenty of eggplant long enough to harvest. The second type of basil in your share this week is Thai basil. Thai basil is often put in curries. Google turns up recipes for Thai basil and other uses. We should be harvesting it along with regular Genovese basil for the next several weeks.

I continue to be pleased with the potato harvest. Unearthing the potatoes with the machine is going well. A few times I have gotten very stuck in the soft soil at our friend Joanne’s where I am growing the potatoes. Fortunately, the tractor is light enough for a little guy like me to push it out with Joanne driving.

So far we have been able to harvest a good amount of tomatoes but we are bound to hit a point this season when we don’t have many tomatoes. Too many of them have been lost to the late blight. Other farmers across the East coast are having trouble with the fungus as well. They are calling it the late blight epidemic of 2009. What fun. We still have a good deal of healthy plants and are going to focus on protecting them.

The tomatoes in our greenhouse seem to be doing the best. Late blight does not thrive in dry hot conditions. The main lesson I’m taking out of this year is that we need to put up at least two more greenhouses. The second lesson is that we need to spray organic fungus controls even more aggressively and systematically than we already do.

Joe Goldsmith is one of the few former tobacco farmers in the county who has transitioned to growing vegetables. He has supplied quality produce to the CSA for several years now. His family farm is right along the Patuxant River and is flat out beautiful. It’s also literally flat which is rare in our hilly area.

Joe benefits from good soil and the help of retired tobacco farmer friends. When I went down to pick up the watermelons, Joe was picking tomatoes with two other well seasoned southern Maryland farmers. When he could not get his old tractor started to lift the pallet of melons on to the truck, the other guys came out of the tomato field to help. For a novice farmer like me who works alone most of the time, having a couple experienced farmers on hand whenever you have trouble is utmost luxury.

After trying to jump start the tractor with little success, they pulled it with another tractor and got it going. After putting the melons for your shares on the truck, Joe nearly backed the tractor into the truck they used during the failed jump start attempts. His ninety-something year-old father honked the horn in another truck where he had been watching the whole tractor resuscitation. Joe latter denied that he was going to crash into the truck if his father had not alerted him but that looked to be the case to me.

Next week your shares should include tomatoes, basil, garlic, potatoes and eggplant from our farm, corn and banana peppers from Joe’s farm, and perhaps okra and another thing or two.

Scott

The End of Spring

We harvested plenty of beans for this week’s share, almost 6 bushels. Picking them is very time consuming but one of my favorite things to do when the plants are loaded with quality beans as they were Monday. Besides the beans, your shares included tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, chard and basil from our farm. Most people also received the last of the spring lettuce.

I continue to be really please with the chard. Insects don’t seem to bother it and it stands up much better to heat than lettuce. Deer also skipped right over it and ate most of our last lettuce crop. Fortunately, they do not know how good the chard is lightly cooked for a few minutes with olive oil.

Ronald grew the early red potatoes. He had to spray them about a month ago for the juvenile Colorado potato beetle. The beets are unsprayed and from two different Mennonite farms. We got them thru the Loveville Maryland Auction. The auction is in the center of the Old Order Mennonite community and everyone takes their produce there by horse. As they farm by horse and mule as well, their produce has a very low carbon foot print. Using some nifty technology, we phoned and left a message with a good bid for beets. Our friend Henry Stauffer who works at the auction got the message and bided for us. We are too busy picking our own crops to bid ourselves.

The auction is in its third year and has been a real boom to what is pretty much southern Maryland’s last intact community of farmers. Most of the Mennonite farmers switched from growing tobacco within the last ten years. At first, growing vegetables was not working for them because they had to pay to have them hauled to distant markets. Since they built the auction, vegetable farming has been working out well for them.

Jug Bay Market Garden is going on vacation. Going up to Lake George, the Queen of Lakes. We will resume CSA distribution in two weeks. We changed our plans and there will not be pickup at the farm Monday.

Enjoy your shares,

Scott

Your Shares This Week

This week your shares include a mix of summer and spring crops, not that surprising being at the turn of the seasons. The lettuce, red Russian kale, kohlrabi, mint, basil, squash, zuchinni and cucumbers were grown organically by us. John Wenger grew the tomatoes organically in his greenhouse. Ronald and his sons grew the beans which they have not sprayed with anything.

We harvested two types of squash today. The long ones with green tips are called Zepher and are our favorite squash to grow. The patty pans with the green centers are Sunburst, another good tasting variety.

Next week will be our first week without lettuce. Good bye spring lettuce you have been so good to us. We would have had another round had the deer not finally tuned into our lettuce field. Thanks for staying away so long, deer. Jug Bay Market Garden has let its defenses down the past couple weeks. This week we are going to sure up our electric fences.

Even from this far out, I can see next week’s share clearly. We will have beans from our farm in addition to some from Ronald’s. Most years Ronald and the other farmers in Saint Mary’s County are close to two weeks ahead of us even though they are just 45 minutes to the south. Saint Mary’s County is a thin peninsula between the Potomac and the much better known Patuxent. The heat absorbing rivers protect the land from frost extending the season at both ends. I bother with this explanation so I can say that this year the differences between us are less and my crops are coming in soon after Saint Mary’s farmers. I think the cool wet spring slowed everyone down even though farmers down there were able to put their plants out earlier.

Ok what else will we have next week besides beans. Squash, John Wenger tomatoes, chard, cucumbers, potatoes from Ronald, kale and herbs. We hope you enjoy your shares this week,

Scott