8/16/09 Newsletter

Dear Friends,

We are half way through the summer season with this being week 9 out of 18. We are pleasantly surprised so far with the quantities and variety of produce you have been getting. This week we will not have potatoes. We have had several pieces of equipment break down and we are incapable of harvesting those potatoes! You are getting, Walla Walla onions, orange carrots, cabbage or cauliflower, summer squash, slicing cucumbers, green & purple bell peppers, Globe eggplant, a few ears of corn, and muskmelon. New crops this week include lemon cucumbers, cinnamon basil, jalepeno peppers, banana peppers and red & yellow watermelon!

Cool weather again this week means the tomatoes are another week later. For those of you who have not grown tomatoes, they have stages of colors they go through before they turn red. We will see tomatoes in several shades of green, from dark to almost white. From there they turn an ugly yellow color and then head to an orange stage. The final stage before turning red is the pink stage. This is a tomato that is red, but not red enough to pick! One plant can have all the colors present on it. Right now we are starting to see a few plants with white and yellow tomatoes. Let’s convince Mother Nature to kick up the heat a little and see where it takes us!

Mother Nature has really thrown a curve ball in our direction this summer! It has not only affected the produce and when it ripens, but also the animals. The beef processing was postponed by one or two months. And now we will be postponing the processing of the sheep. We had several processing dates set well in advance for late August and September. But we will be cancelling those dates. It will be approximately another 3 or 4 months before they are at an acceptable weight for processing. For those of you getting lamb, we will send you a letter just as soon as we know something! The pigs, however, appear to still be on schedule for the October and November processing dates. We will be sending out information by letter to those of you who have pigs as well!

Just out of curiosity, I went back 5 and 10 years to find out what we were doing. Ten years ago we only had 215 members and 9 Distribution sites. We only distributed produce one day a week. Our Full Shares cost $400, our Half Share cost $250 and the Single Share cost $175. Five years later, a member created our new logo (as above), we added a fruit share and we had 350 memberships. We were distributing produce 2 days a week to 12 distribution sites. The cost of a Full Share was $470, a Half Share was $315 and a Single Share cost $235. Today, we have 600 members & 24 Distribution Sites. We also added a third day of distribution! The cost of a Full Share is now $620, a Half Share is $440 and a Single Share costs $335. My, how things have progressed!

Today’s tidbit: Just like trees, we all need to find a place to grow and branch out!

Jacquie, Jerry, Alaina and Kyle Monroe