At the end of August, on a warm Saturday afternoon we hosted a potluck for our CSA members. It was a great occasion to get to know each other, walk around the farm, talk about food and taste a lot of good stuff our members brought. We loaded plenty of colorful vegetable salads on our plates, dipped chips in oriental baba ganoush and humus, bit into hot dogs, licked our fingers after trying peach crisp and cooled ourselves with a Polish homemade apple drink. How good to eat outside on the summer day!

Thanks for coming everybody! It was a pleasure to have you on our farm!

Last fall we published some photos of planting garlic. It takes the whole winter, spring and a bit of summer for it to grow. This is what came up!

This is a follow up post on the hoophouses on our farm. We were glad to gain some experience growing vegetables in these sturdy structures. Tomatoes were our best crop, most of them without any marks or splits. We also grew peppers, cucumbers, lettuce and pac choi.

There were a lot of weather difficulties in the spring time. On hot sunny days, but very windy too, it was tricky to keep the hoophouses well ventilated and keep the plastic covering safe from damaging winds at the same time.

But we made it! Now we are looking forward to some early winter spinach experimenting!

Have you ever thought about a journey of a tomato? I can’t think of any other vegetable right now, because we have a lot of tomatoes, harvesting them a lot, polishing and stocking, and thankfully selling some too.

I was pruning tomato plants, we have a lot of heirloom ones which need pruning, and one medium size tomato ended up in my hand. It was round and perfectly red, with no chicken pocks, nor scars or splitting, just an idea of tomato, like Plato would say.

It struck me that what I was holding was an end product of a seed that came from far far away; from a tomato that grew somewhere in Iowa or Maine, and after harvesting it and saving it’s seeds, this one seed among the others, was shipped to us and stored in our fridge. Then it went into some potting soil and spent a few weeks growing into a seedling, under artificial lights and in the micro-climate of our basement. Then the seedling went outside and spent some time on a trailer, to get tough and rough before hitting the hoophouse, to feel the wind and heat of the sun. Eventually it was buried with the roots down into the soil, with poly cover over it, with drip tape by the stem.

And then it continued the trip, this time on a rough road, sometimes sandy and dry, with some weeds, mineral deficiencies, flea beetles, cutworms, few tornado warnings and 60 mph winds, tired with tomato twine a dozen times, to stay in a row, pruned and pruned.

And the plant finally burst with red and pink, like a slot machine in Vegas, showing fruits in one line, bingo! Accumulations everywhere! Viva DelaBlu tomatoes! And there it was, this one perfect tomato, that I had just picked, on a journey.