Essex Farm: Nature Will Find a Way

Through the field at Essex Farm. (Credit Kristin Kimball)

Want the news from Essex Farm? Hear the update from Kristin Kimball below:

“A storm rolled through yesterday afternoon and dropped just enough rain to water in the transplants: fall lettuce and the overwintering scallions. The weather for the second half of the summer has been docile, as though it’s obeying our wishes, after all those weeks of cursed rain. Now the thing to wish for is a long, warm Indian summer and a very late frost, to let the corn kernels fatten, the soybean pods fill, and the root crops come to full maturity. Even if they are a bit behind, the fields are as beautiful as they’ve ever been.

The whole team harvested tomatoes this week until their hands and forearms were black with resin, and there is much more to come. The plants seem to be outpacing the early blight that climbs slowly up the vines each year. Fall arugula is coming on. I can’t wait for that peppery green treat. We have some cantaloupe melons coming in, though I haven’t yet had one that was truly sweet.

Jenny and Matt led a much-needed assault against weeds this week. The big weeds got pulled by hand, and hauled to the compost pile. Two teams of horses – Jake and Abby, and the old warriors, Jay and Jack – were hitched to the cultivators, to take care of the smaller weeds. We also used the one-horse cultivator again, to get the weeds between the wide-set hills of potatoes.

Speaking of potatoes, we dug up a few Kennebecs on Wednesday to see how they are doing. You will remember that last year we planted a lot of acreage to potatoes but the field was low in fertility and the weeds got ahead of us, which left us with lots and lots of very small potatoes. As a farmer and as a cook, I hate small potatoes – too much work on both ends. This year, we planted much less land to potatoes but put them in drained ground, and invested them with a lot of compost plus bought-in organic fertilizer, and kept the weeds well under control. I think you will all be pleased with the results, members. The sample potatoes were big as my two fists put together…” [Continue reading this Essex Farm Note.]

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About Essex Farm

In 2004 Mark and Kristin Kimball founded Essex Farm in Essex, NY. It was the first full-diet CSA farm formed (as far as they know)! Kristin wrote her memoir, The Dirty Life, chronicling her transition from city girl to farm wife and the first year of life at Essex Farm. Since then Kristin continues to chronicle life on the farm on her blog, which we give you snippets of here on the Essex on Lake Champlain Blog.