We can’t believe the CSA will be coming to close for this year… next week!  Yes, we are sad to say that the last CSA pick-up for 2009 will be next Wednesday, September 30th.  The members I talked with at yesterday’s pick-up also seem sad to know it is coming to an end.

While the CSA may be coming to close, we still plan to have our farm stand going every Thursday from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. and we invite you all to stop buy and continue to show your support for our little farm.  Apart from our farm fresh produce, you just might catch Jenny selling her fine home-made medicinal herbs, tinctures, and body care products. Marianne plans to be there with her delicious raspberries (while they last), and the other cool arty & crafty stuff she has.  And if I can pull it together, I may be selling some of my fine art photo too!

We are even talking about having a Harvest Market one Saturday in October, so stay tuned for more info on that.

A huge thank you to all of our CSA members who helped make this farm possible, and all of the folks who helped in the garden!  We hope to see you all again next year!

-”Farmer” Jim

It was snowing at my cabin in Eldora, and the weather down on the farm in Lafayette was looking pretty chilly.  The weather called for a low of 34 Tuesday, so I headed back down the hill to help Tracy, Carlos, and Jillian harvest tomatoes, basil, and some other items just in case the weather decided to take a bite out of our warm weather crops.  Carlos & I tried to cover the sensitive crops with row cover, but some of the remaining row cover was pretty worn out after being used all season.  We did get the peppers, eggplant, and some tomato rows covered.  Tracy & Jillian harvested a lot of basil since the cold weather was already trashing some plants.  It looks like they saved a lot, and we’ll definitely have fresh basil for Wednesday’s CSA pick-up.  We also plan to dry a bunch and if we have enough we can offer bags of dried basil also.

Hard to believe we are quickly approaching October!  Hard to believe that, soon, we will no longer have all the fresh, extremely local, produce that we’ve been spoiled with for the past four to five months.  Maybe we need to offer a Fresh Produce Rehab course!

We are considering changing our farm stand to be self-service and open at least 5 days a week.  Our current hours, 4:30 to 6:30 pm on Thursdays is a limited time for most, and we appreciate those of you who do stop by during those hours.  Since our farm is so small, and we can’t afford to pay someone to sit at the farm stand every day, we feel the self-serve stand will be a great way to reach more of you who would like to support our small farm and buy produce from us.

Stayed tuned for more on this topic!

This summer Tristen (seen in this photo), and his brothers Gabriel, and Nicholas were out visiting their grandmother, Ginger, and helped us out in the garden and farm stand, in between enjoying their stay on the farm.

For 2010 we will be looking for one farm intern to help us throughout the season.  We’ll post more info about that position a little later this year.

In the last episode, I mean blog post, I mentioned how we had more tomatoes than you could shake a stick at.  A very big stick.  Now we have more tomatoes than you can shake a telephone pole at, if you were able to shake a telephone, and were so inclined.

So, time to sell what we can, and can the rest.  Stop by our farmstand on Thursdays from 4:30 to 6:30 pm, and load up on a wide range of tomatoes, including Heirlooms!  Or, feel free to contact us to place an order.  If you are a restaurant, food co-op or other grocery store looking to support local farms, get in touch!

If you are in Nederland, or stopping through, I highly recommend the Savory Cafe.  Not only do they buy some of our produce, they have the best food in town!

Can your tomatoes, and salsa, and pasta sauce!  I posted some info on canning on my Colorado Local Sustainability website, check it out! Canning is not as hard as you think.  Heck, if I could make a batch of my pasta sauce and can that in between doing ad sales for the Rocky Mountain Growers Directory, you can too!

We have a few tomatoes… about 80 pounds picked over the past week!  Whew!  Stop by the farm stand and buy a few pounds.  Add them to your salad, make Caprese salad, make a batch of salsa or tomato sauce, or start canning.

Tomatoes fresh from the farm or garden just can’t be beat.  One of our CSA working share members said she never liked tomatoes until she had a truly fresh tomato from the garden.  Tomatoes from the store just do not compare, eat fresh, eat local!

Check out this article, Terrific Tomato Soup and other Tomato Recipes for more ideas on what you can do with all these tomatoes you get in your CSA box, or buy at our farm stand.

Well, not a huge farm stand, but traffic is still building and we’re slowly putting out more produce.  This Thursday’s was nice… Chard, Kale, Red Onions, Yellow Onions, Patty Pan squash, Yellow Crookneck squash and Zucchini, Bok Choy, Salad mix with edible flowers, Cucumbers, Anaheim Peppers, Jalapenos, Beets, Yellow Beans… and copies of the Rocky Mountain Growers Directory.

A very big thank you to all of you who have been supporting our farm by stopping by the farm stand… and a bigger thanks to all of our repeat customers!

We are starting to get more and more summer squash and will have more available for our CSA members and farmstand soon.  We have zucchini, yellow crookneck, and scallop squash (aka patty pan).  For those of you who have seen our garden, you know that things are growing like crazy!  The tomatoes are doing well, and we hope to have those available in the next week or two.  The peppers are also starting to produce fruit, but it may be a few weeks before those are available.  We have a couple types of bell peppers, and several types of hot peppers, I can’t wait!  The winter squash are going completely nuts, and I’m sure everyone will enjoy those this fall.  The winter squash are good for storage, so if you get a ton, don’t feel like you have to eat them right away.  Red and yellow onions are also getting close!  And today I saw that our cucumbers are producing!  Woo hoo!

The past couple weeks we’ve been pulling a lot of plants that are past their prime.  We still have lettuce, but the variety for the salad mix is slim right now.  Tracy & I have reseeded a bunch of lettuce and other items which will probably be ready in late August and go through September.

One sad note… the broccoli didn’t do so well and was mostly just taking up valuable space.  I had chosen a variety that was supposed to be a early and prolific producer, but it wasn’t producing for us.  Since we were only able to harvest less than a half pound every couple weeks, and it was getting attacked by bugs, we decided to pull it  and plant more items for the fall.

So that is the news for now!

If you are commuting down Arapahoe Road in Lafayette near HWY 287, don’t miss our farmstand!  We are 1/4 mile west of Hwy 287, or about 1 mile east of 95th Street.  We are on the south side of the road and there is a large sign out front that says “Hearteye Village CSA Farmstand”.  We have our tent up just behind the berm next to the sign.  Stop in, by fresh veggies, and support your local farm!

I was working in the garden Friday and heard a jet… which isn’t surprising since there is a lot of air traffic over our property.  It actually sounds like some big military aircraft… then again it didn’t sound like an aircraft at all.  I stopped what I was doing and looked toward where the sound was coming from… holy crap!  It was thousands of bees flying my way.  I made a beeline (ha) to the garden shed and just watched as they moved across the garden and into the big cottonwood tree on the south end of the garden.

Once I realized I wasn’t in some Hitchcock movie (or Irwin Allen in the case of the 1978 classic, The Swarm), I headed back out to watch this amazing event.

The basic idea of a bee swarm is that the bee colony has grown to big for their original hive.  The work bees raise a new queen, scout bees look for a new location, and once they find a suitable new home, the new queen, worker bees and drones fly off to greener pastures.  You can learn more about swarming on the Beemaster site.