People blog all the time about the happy, sunny side of community supported agriculture. Then this week, I realized that Hurricane Irene had smacked around my farm.
When I say "my" farm, I mean Gorman Produce Farm in Laurel where we're splitting a share with RDAdoc and family. The weekly bag came with some nice-looking tomatoes, but also a note that made me realize that my share of the 2011 harvest has shrunk.
Wind and water ruined tomatoes ready to pick. They blew flowers off eggplants and peppers. They forced Gorman to pull squash long before they were cured. Bummer, but I signed up for the risk.
And the real risk is stink bugs! They ruined many tomatoes in my personal garden, and Gorman reports the same kind of problem. Their note has the nicest explanation of why they were sending squash covered in blotches:
We can't just too them into the compost pile, there is plenty of good meat to the squash. We ask for your understanding and that you eat these right away! I brought some home hacked off the bad part, skinned and cubed the squash and have mine stored covered in the fridge. It is ready to go into any meal this week.That's the reality of CSAs. On the up side, I have a delicious-looking yellow heirloom on my counter. On the down side, my fall eggplants got wiped out by that hurricane, and my squash are being molested by exotic insects. But it is pretty cool to know what the farmer is eating for dinner.
4 comments:
I made a curry butternut squash soup from the squash in our CSA share, and it came out great. It did seem a little skimpy this week, but I was actually expecting it to be worse!
A couple weeks ago at the Weds. Howard County farmer's market one of the vendors said the stink bugs had destroyed all of his yellow squash & green beans. Until this summer, we non-farmers didn't understand how destructive these bugs are.
We still should do our best to help the farmers out though. Please keep buying local whenever you can! Once they pave over a farm it's gone.
The stink bugs absolutely destroyed our sunflowers this year. They were literally covering every inch of the surface on several of the flowers at times. Very angry.
Props to Breezy Willow farm, don't know what they've done but our CSA with them has been fantastic. Besides a couple of bruised tomatoes, we've had nothing but beautiful produce so far, including all our squash!
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