Of course, it rained an inch once we drip irrigated our crops!

Carl is back home (THANK GOODNESS) and last week he was able to connect our drip irrigation, and then after drip irrigating our crops for a few hours (these crops being peppers, basil, eggplant, winter squash and melons), it rained almost an inch that evening! In addition, he figured out why our irrigation was not watering all our runs while he was gone. I left an end cap off one of the irrigation runs so the system wasn’t building up enough pressure. We figured this out because I stayed by the tractor while he walked the lines and it was a big learning lesson for me because I just assumed we had too many lines/sprinkler heads connected to our irrigation system. We are pushing water approximately 75 feet in elevation for a distance of 600 feet in 4 inch pipe for our “mainline”. Then, connected to our mainline, we have 5 runs of 3 inch pipe for our distribution runs – all approximately 300 feet long – with approximately 7 sprinkler heads spitting out water on each run. It is simply a miracle to see the tractor/pump push that much water up into the fields.

Now it has been over a week since we last had rain and thankfully our sweet corn got the much needed precipitation for it to flourish. We are not yet sure if our corn will form tasty ears for our CSA and market customers because it is teaseling a little early. We hope and pray that in a couple weeks we can provide our CSA with sweet corn.

I am thankful that Carl is back because that allowed us to dig our garlic so it can begin curing. Most of our garlic looks pretty good this year and I think we will have plenty of good quality garlic for market sales and for the CSA! In addition we dug our first bed of red potatoes, the variety being “Red Gold”, and they are lovely and delicious.

It is unusually hot here in the mountains and being in our little singlewide trailer is probably similar to being in a sweat lodge. So last night we grilled out rather than heating our house up further with a little oven/stove action and let me tell you we had a fabulous dinner! We grilled bulb fennel, yellow squash, eggplant, zucchini, a foil package of beets and new potatoes, and Italian sausage from Spring House Meats. We marinated the fennel/squash/eggplant in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, white wine, fresh garlic, salt and pepper.

Summer just doesn’t get any better than grilling out!

PRODUCTION NOTE TO SELF: Need some “fluff” in our CSA Boxes for the end of June/July. Our boxes were valued a $29 this past week but they didn’t look full without greens. Ideas are fennel, more beets, swiss chard. Our swiss chard is not growing in this heat. To harvest enough for everyone we would need a “Summer Succession”. Seed beans earlier.