New Roadside Stand

Well, it’s hap­pened, we final­ly have more pro­duce than we know what to do with.

The Carlisle farmer’s mar­ket has been real­ly fun, and it’s been great talk­ing to oth­er ven­dors and cus­tomers, but we real­ized pret­ty quick­ly that we had more sup­ply than the mar­ket’s demand. It’s been an inter­est­ing change to go from focus­ing on grow­ing to focus­ing on sell­ing. I imag­ine it feels about the same as get­ting to the end of the swim­ming por­tion of a triathlon and real­iz­ing it’s time to get on your bike (to com­plete the anal­o­gy, let’s say the plan­ning last win­ter was the road race, or maybe that’ll be can­ning this fall). While it’s been stress­ful try­ing to off-load let­tuce before it bolts (goes to flower and gets bit­ter) it’s kind of worth it to see a prod­uct all the way from seed to shop­ping bag. We’ve also been sell­ing some pro­duce to Savory Lane in Acton, where I work as the Sun­day brunch chef, so in that case I’ve seen my beet greens go from seed all the way to some­one’s mouth.
In addi­tion, we’ve also start­ed a small self-serve road­side stand this week. It’s been fair­ly suc­cess­ful so far, and we’re hop­ing once peo­ple start to remem­ber our sign…
…and know that we’re here, they’ll start com­ing more reg­u­lar­ly. We’re able to put out a pret­ty good selec­tion these days.
Kale, beets, let­tuce and eggs in the coolers
Sun­burst squash: beautiful.

 

Posies
We’ve also con­tin­ued to sell to 80 Thore­au Restau­rant in Con­cord, and we’re going to start a small CSA. This year we can prob­a­bly only com­mit to four or five peo­ple, but we’re hop­ing that next year we sell a lot of our pro­duce this way. It’s a pret­ty nice mod­el for a small farm.
Mean­while, our gar­den is get­ting pret­ty lush.
Our cher­ry toma­to plants are on the verge of exploding…
First signs of color!
We’ve also been deal­ing with our fair share of pests. Our cab­bages and brus­sel sprouts got attacked by cab­bage worms last week, and we spent a morn­ing pick­ing them off before blan­ket­ing the plants in row cov­er, and today Mom and I found about 15 of these HUGE horned worms on our toma­to plants! The chick­ens loved them.
That’s one of the nice things about work­ing on a farm, you hard­ly ever throw any­thing away.
It’s pret­ty scary to see how fast one of these can devour a toma­to leaf.
But over­all things are look­ing good. It’s been a hot and dry cou­ple of weeks, but luck­i­ly our soil seems to hold a lot of water, and with some irri­ga­tion and a lot of mulching we’ve been able to keep the plants happy.
Leeks
Cab­bages, uncov­ered. In order to keep weeds down, we’ve seed­ed a lot of our walk­ways in clover.
Sum­mer squash, covered.
The Mighty Aubergine
Cool heir­loom eggplants.
In case you’ve ever won­dered what egg­plant plants look like.
Hun­gar­i­an black peppers