Farm share, week 7

[magid]

From this week's email:

We're still getting lots of really generous and thoughtful offers from neighboring un-flooded organic farms to harvest from their fields, so we'll keep that up this week and likely into future weeks as well. It's sort of counter-intuitive because our farm and several others have had such a disastrous experience, but it's actually been a really good growing season weather-wise (in general) so most of our neighbors are having very abundant harvests that are likely to continue. So far we haven't had to pay for any produce from other farms, it's all been offered free for the Stone Soup Crew to harvest. It's a win-win situation because our neighbors have extra crops and not enough time to harvest, and our crew has extra time and not enough crops! I'm really grateful to be part of this incredibly supportive, interdependent network of small farms.

This week's plan is to harvest more green cabbage from Atlas Farm, kale from Mountain View Farm, Swiss chard from Next Barn Over, fresh onions from Kitchen Garden, and carrots from Riverland Farm. Big shout-outs to these farms for stepping up! We also have a few nice crops from un-flooded Stone Soup land that should be ready this week, mainly eggplant, cucumbers, and herbs.

I want to give an extra special shout-out to Ray at Next Barn Over because they have offered another thing we're really needing right now, which is un-flooded land to plant new crops for fall harvest (government farming authorities such as MDAR have said that flooded land shouldn't be planted again until next spring because of possible short-term soil contamination). So last week I plowed up some NBO land that they weren't using and next week we'll be able to plant crops there for harvest in September and October! There were also a few small parcels of unflooded land on our own farm that I managed to seed last week. So, lots of silver linings!

• two pounds of carrots
  
• two pounds of beets
  
• two medium heads of green cabbage
  
• two large cucumbers (swapped for another pound of beets and another head of cabbage)
  
• two bags of basil
  
• two large bunches of herbs (I chose oregano and tarragon; the shiso was gone and I didn't want holy basil)
  
• six small eggplants (I chose Italian rather than Asian)
  
• four onions (I'm guessing Ailsa Craig)
  
• a bunch of green Swiss chard
  
• two bunches of green curly kale

First thoughts: get through 9 Av, and then decide once the weather breaks. I still have a bunch left from last week, and the fridge tetris is going to be a challenge until I cook for Shabbat (I'm out for dinner, and a cabbage slaw requested, so at least that will happen Friday. What else? Who knows! I have <50 min to finish making and eating dinner, so that's it for now.)