September News from Chetwyn Hello , Fall is here! Well at least it will be before the month is over. We have always loved fall and this one is off to a great start! The poison oak is starting to turn its beautiful colors and the sun is lower in the sky. There are acorns falling from the trees and our locals squirrel is spending his days collecting
walnuts from the walnut tree by the pasture. We also just picked our extremely small pumpkin crop. |
Avocado Sunburn-- There are some hot days predicted on the forecast, and hot days are no fun for our trees. One of the most common ways we lose fruit is to sunburn. Yep, avocados can get sunburn just like we do, except where they burn the skin gets charred black. We are going to get shade cloth for next year to protect the trees when the heat wave hits them, but for this upcoming hot spell we will just do what we can to ready the trees.
The burned fruit is still edible, even though the outside looks scorched. We call these "Uglies" and set them aside from the market-ready avocados to eat for ourselves or to give to others. We find many people are happy to welcome the Uglies into their kitchens. |
Fig Season-- As fall approaches, our figs are getting ripe and will soon be showing up at the market. We have 18 fig trees and most of them are quite small, but they are happily growing. As with everything on our farm, it is a small crop with big dreams. We are expecting a bigger crop every year to bring to the market. Right now, the biggest producing trees are the Chetwyn Figs along with one Black
Mission, one Brown Turkey, and one Tiger Stripe. Unlike avocados, which we pick a tree at a time for the next week's market, we pick the only ripest of the figs each night and store them in the refrigerator until the market rolls around. You can tell if a fig is at perfect ripeness if it starts to get tiny splits in its skin. Being such a small farm that sells at the local farmers market makes it possible for us to harvest this way. |
Meet one of the newer additions to our farm, Stanley the rooster. He is not actually new, since we got him as a day-old baby chick back in April, but we didn't find out he was a rooster until a few weeks ago. He sort of looked like a rooster, but wasn't crowing. Well, now he is crowing every morning, which is always a nice sound to have on the farm. He also looks out for the lady hens and keeps squabbles from breaking out in the
coop. |
At This Month's Market--
This month our Reed avocados (and possible Lamb Hass)
will be at the market. The Reed is a smooth green-skinned spherical avocado. They have good oil content with a very great flavor and stand as a customer favorite!
The Lamb Hass are my mom's favorite, because they have the same wonderful flavor and high oil content of a Hass, just bigger.
We will continue bringing our
lemons to the market. Hopefully some limes as well as the month goes along.
|
|
