Fresh Faces, Feasts, and Fruitage!

This week has heralded the arrival of several new interns to our crew, growing our number well into the twenties! In addition, we celebrated the arrival of a few fresh fields of crops for harvesting, as well as our boss Isaac's birthday Tuesday, and our wonderful weekly Friday intern family dinner, with Lucia taking on the incredible (and super tasty!) task of grilling out for near to twenty five people! It was another awesome week on the farm, and we spent a healthy amount of time continuing our planting schedule, finishing Pie Four and Fisher Fields with tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and melons. Hasanbey, Uzin, and Altinbas include the three incredible heirloom melon varieties our farmer, Andy Grant brought from Turkey! We also finished laying the plastic in Pie Four and completed twenty acres of hand planting in that field alone. Finishing the Fisher Field accounted for, I think, ten more. Yay Ya! 


It's also garlic scape season and we spent a portion of just about every day harvesting the curly scapes from our hard neck garlic field for shipment to Whole Foods and other grocers, as well as for our CSA farm shares. The scape is the center of the hard neck plant which spirals in a corkscrew and is what would eventually become the flower of the plant if not harvested. It has a springy, fresh garlic flavor and is great roasted, in a scramble, vegan quesadilla, or even on the grill, as Lucia aptly demonstrated on Friday night. 


Other items of note this week were hoeing weeds, harvesting spinach for the chickens, breaking down in 'Mater (our beat up Ford pick up) and having to drive a school bus around instead, and welcoming some great new people to our crew. Word up to Stephanie, Colten, Alex, Luke, Emma, Seyward, Elizabeth, & Ethan. Here are the Farm Fotos for the week:

June 4

Hollis, rocking the Grant Farms shirt, harvesting some yummy garlic scapes!

June 5

Our crew building a new haystack with bales from a stack that had collapsed. Left to right, Elena behind Richie, Jacob, Megan, Ken,
Colten, Stephanie, and Isaac. We surprised Isaac with a cake and wearing party hats for his birthday, and Jacob wore his all day. Bomb. 

June 6

Nate, calling Isaac after we killed poor 'Mater, trying to haul a heavy wagon filled
with 150 Tosca containers full of spinach for our chickens. The truck was not
up to the challenge and we ended up walking back to Cuca's Kitchen to grab a
school bus to get around in. This story sounds like something I made up, or
maybe a whacked out dream...

June 7

Alex, with a tray of our beautiful Turkish melons, planting in Pie Four. Melons are part of the
cucurbitaceae family that includes cucumbers, watermelons and gourds, and is probably in the top
five lists of awesome words to say.

June 8

Katie and me with my favorite shovel of all time,  Baby Super Shovel. I started out hating it so much, because it really is just a sawed off shovel, and I have no idea why anyone would ever do that. But then the shovel and I spent a lot of quality time laying down
all the plastic in this field, and we bonded so much that this picture had to happen. 

June 9

Luke and Hollis hoeing the perennial flower garden. I grabbed some great shots of our working members in the bonus shots of the week as well. 

Bonus Fotos:

Here are a few snaps of our great CSA working members, thank you everyone for coming our to help us on your Saturday!

Nick and Kara 

Mohan, hoeing around the Passion Flower

Emma, on the left with our working member Laycie

Scape-tasticness.

Elizabeth, one of our touring WOOFers, with hard neck garlic and even more scape-tasticness. 

Our weekly Friday Intern Family Dinner. Outside, sunset, deliciousness. 

Once again, another stellar week at Grant Family Farms. We have new crops bursting with cilantro, three varieties of green and red leaf lettuce, new green onions, and of course spinach, rhubarb and horseradish. It's been amazing to get our new plants in the ground the past few weeks, and even more fun to see them thriving and getting bigger. Harvesting the scapes has giving us a little taste in the spring of what harvest time will get to be like in the fall, and I have a feeling things are only going to get more crazy, and more fun as the season progresses. Have an excellent Sunday, and thanks for checking in.

XO,

Val