Hi everyone!

So much has happened on the farm over the last couple of months! July and August are definitely the hardest months to be vegetable farmers, and the first half of September is a close second. I’m writing from the other side now, but here’s a quick recap of the madness!

It was tough waiting for our barn to get finished. The Earthbound folks brought in a crew of Amish builders to speedily put up our barn's siding and roof while they chipped away at the interior siding. It was insanely hot the last week of August but...we got to use our barn for the first time!! It was so nice and a bit hard to believe it was real! Bryan reconstructed our walk in cooler which is so much bigger than I remember. Now we just have to figure out where to put everything...I'm sure it will be a work in progress.

The peak summer meant many exhausting weeks on our hot, dry farm . Bryan and Abram, our irrigation maestros, worked tirelessly to get water to all of our plants. We had to wait to plant lots of fall crops because it was just too hot. We also had to wait to harvest potatoes. There's really not much low-key work for folks to do in the extreme heat at that time of year, so we just have to respect the heat and wait for it to cool down. While it did cool down, we still didn’t get much in the way of rain. It was so frustrating seeing the storms move around us on the radar!

It finally rained in late August, which is great for some crops but less great for others. It marked the beginning of the end of tomato season along with the return of fall crops like kale, collards, and lots of lettuce. Our friends west and north of us experience some serious flooding which is scary and devastating. It's hard to feel relieved that this storm didn't hit us when another catastrophic weather event always seems to be around the corner. But we were fine, and everything green was growing quickly with all of the rain.

Late summer is when we do lots of bulk harvesting - bringing in all of a crop at once so we can store it for winter. We got the first of our small winter squash out like delicata and honeynut. We also continued bringing in our ample potato crop. Now that the vast majority of planting is done, it's all about chipping away at big projects on the farm like bulk harvesting and cleaning up.

We did more washing and packing in our barn during September which was very cool! It was nice to be inside for the rainiest day of the week, and we dressed up for our made up holiday of Second Halloween! We got some amazing financial help through a crowdfunded Kiva loan which allowed us to finish the barn despite increases in materials costs.

The south side of the barn (still waiting on our garage doors!)

We planted our first tunnel with baby greens for the winter which I'm very excited about. Our first round of broccoli seems to have gotten sick during the hot and wet weather earlier this month, so we're not sure what kind of yields we'll end up with, but the second round and all of the cauliflower still look awesome.

I wanted to let you know that we have space available in our 3-week December share! You'll get a bounty of all of our tasty winter salad greens and bunched greens like kale, plus sweet potatoes, winter squash, potatoes and turnips. We have 25 spaces available and you can sign up for this share on our website: https://www.harvie.farm/farm/good-dog-farm/signup.

Hope you’ve enjoyed hearing about the ups and downs of this summer! We’ll have more to report soon.