Hello There, Strangers!

Hi, folks. Seems like it has been 6.4 years since I last updated you on the progress of the Farm. Many important Milestones have occurred since then in my other life as a grad student, but if you know me in person, I've already bored you with all the details. And if you don't know me in real life, now would be a good time to be glad about that.

But! Even while I've been busy with school, many many things have happened on the farm. I think we'll need a list here, there are so many...
1.) The only things still growing on the farm are tomatoes, watermelon, and a few mini zucchinis on one sad, sorry plant. That's it, folks!
2.) I harvested the bounty (or what I thought would be the bounty) of the carrots. The big plan, as I think I mentioned before, was to freeze the carrots so that I could enjoy the exciting flavors of the farm in the winter, instead of boring old grocery store carrots. Well look what the whole, entire harvest entailed:

Here, dirty, with the basil (see #3)

Here, cleaned up, but not any more bounty.

Sad. Very very sad. And an amazing waste of farm space, it turns out. Luckily, I had a million farm box carrots, and I grabbed a bunch for $1 at the farmers' market. Also luckily, during the wash/peel/cut/blanche marathon Farmer Sis entertained me with stories of school and her farm (pictures may be coming soon!) so the time flew by. Anyway, the carrots are in the freezer and ready for a taste of summer in the middle of the winter. But lesson learned: next time I have a farm, I will not be planting carrots!

3.) As you can see in the picture above, I also harvested two of our five basil plants. Those got processed with some olive oil (and an extra bunch of farmers' market basil) and then put in a ziploc bag for freezing. I usually use ice cube trays to freeze that stuff in small portions, but Farmer Sand suggested that if you spread it as thin as possible in a freezer bag, you can just break off pieces when you're ready. Genius. Thanks!

4.) All the beans have been pulled, I've finally given up hope on the "fall lettuce," and two, count them two, of the nine tomato plants have moved on to greener pastures. Look for a post soon about the science-in-action learning project that resulted from those plants...

5.) Here's what the harvests look like these days. The yellow tomatoes are a bit cracked from our drought and my attempts at compensating with the hose. But they still taste pretty good; that's the good news.



Farm Vitals
Yesterday's high: 61F
Yesterday's low: 51F
Warnings: weather.com is misleading. I could see my breath this morning. Also, there's a heat wave coming.
Mood of the farm: It better have something to do with ripening as fast as possible during the heat wave this week.
Reason to consider a new career: Still happy with what I have going on over here...