• Cherry Tomatoes
• Beans
• Plum Tomatoes
• Tomatillos
• Basil
• Parsley
• Epazote
• Flowers

CSA shareholders can visit the farm to pick your own Sunday through Thursday during daylight hours. Visit the red pick-your-own kiosk in the fields for a list of available crops and picking supplies.

Fall plantings are in and growing; crops of celeriac and parsnips look good, and several seedings of fall arugula and braising greens are on their way.  Peppers are beginning to color up.  Sweet potato plants look healthy and are growing well, promising a productive crop.  Our leeks are growing beautifully in our 'around-the-corner' field.  Watermelons are just beginning to trickle in, although woodchucks and squirrels have damaged many.  If you don't believe us, check out the tooth marks on the first one you receive. 

We're beginning to plant fall cover crops on fields that have finished their production for this season, or in areas where we can undersow existing crops.  Rye and vetch, which overwinter and produce a large quantity of biomass and organic matter, have gone on where our tomatoes and cucumbers will go next season, and oats and peas, which winter kill, making spring tillage easier, are seeded before early crops like onions, garlic, lettuce and spinach.  Planting cover crops and green manures is one of the most satisfying activities of the farm season, giving something back to the soil that produced so much and beginning the process of putting the fields to bed for the winter.  Nonetheless, we're continuing to transplant and seed fall lettuce, spinach, radishes, turnips, and a number of other crops wherever we can - check out all the newly seeded beds on any walk around the farm. 

This past week saw another of our fine farm interns leave us to return to college.  Vinny Errico has been a steady, even-tempered presence on the farm since he arrived from Cornell University in May.  He comes from an Italian-American family with strong farming roots, and had worked for a season on a farm in New Hampshire before coming to work here in Waltham.  Traveling each day from his home in Andover, Vinny worked with us five days a week harvesting, planting, weeding and even trying out driving our tractor.  He has an inquisitive mind and loved to try cooking new things, including making his own cheese (including nettle rennet from the farm) and grinding amaranth seeds to make flour (not a tasty result - yet).  Vinny's favorite part of the work week was our Tuesday potluck lunch, when his impressive pizza making skills were often on display - homemade cheese and beautiful red and yellow tomatoes (just a few of those pictured above) combined with perfect crust and sweet basil were his specialty.  Along with Kate, he sorted and organized all our garlic (that's just some of it in the photo to the right) and made sure there was sufficient seed stock for our 2008 crop.  He worked once a week with the Cedar Hill Girl Scout Camp when they visited the farm for our Children's Learning Garden program, and helped set up the Sunday evening distribution.  The crowning glory of his summer, though, may have been when he learned to shift our pickup truck - he can almost drive stick now.  We'll miss Vinny and hope that he continues to grow things in his bureau drawers back at Cornell. 

We are so pleased to welcome two new shareholders to the farm!  Helen Rennie's baby girl Samantha and Jen and Steve Sulewski's little girl Anna Jane both joined CSA families this past month.  Babies, mamas and dads are all doing wonderfully.  We can't wait to see Samantha and Anna eating cherry tomatoes!

Out where time sets its own pace, a kind of sweet serenity now possesses the land.  The early rush for a place in the sun is over.  The trend now is toward maturity.  Grapes fatten on the vine.  Early apples begin to blush.  Wild blackberries ripen. 

 The frantic frog chorus that was so loud a little while ago has relaxed to the slow rumble of the frog grandfathers whose voices echo in the night.  On ponds and quiet backwaters appear large patches of green algae.  Cattails lift green bayoneted ranks from the mucky margins.  Dragonflies in the hot afternoon, swallows in the cool of the evening, seine the air for mosquitoes. 

The heat of midday throbs with the cicada's shrill drone, one of the drowsiest of all summer sounds.  When the cicadas rasp you know the last of the insect hordes is out of egg and pupa and moving toward that stage again.  Beetles swarm in the grass.  Grasshoppers rattle into the air ahead as you walk the pasture path.  Green hornworms gnaw at the tomatoes, strange creatures that will become broad-winged sphinx moths and haunt the flower beds at dusk.

The struggle for life goes on, but the great haste of the green world is past.  Even in the insect world a kind of balance is struck.  It is as though we were bidden to watch and listen and understand, relax the little worries, know the big ones for what they are, and strike our own balance on serenity.