Sold Out!

Hey guys! Long time no see.

This week it's just me, Madeleine, as both Kayla and Katie are on vacation. Next week it will be my turn! I'm very excited to go home.

A very exciting thing happened today - I sold produce from the student garden at the South Hadley Farmers' Market for the very first time. Even more exciting - I sold everything! EVERYTHING. How crazy it that?

All set up at the Market Manager's table with Nora

We don't have a working scale so I was essentially fisting a ton of green beans into paper bags and calling it an even $2. It worked pretty well, seeing as I sold about 20-30 lbs. of green beans, about 25-30 pickling cucumbers, and 7 pint jars of homemade pickles. Yes, the same ones we made in our last blog post. I got to taste them the other day - refreshingly salty.

A close up of all our produce. I'm telling you, we had so many green beans.

The pickles sold incredibly fast. Thank goodness Kayla and I made 16 more jars of dill pickles using cucumbers from our very own garden just this past Tuesday. They should be ready to sell for $4 a pop next Thursday at the Farmers' Market!

The garden itself seems to be doing pretty well. The corn is coming along great. It's about 6 feet tall now - where it hasn't been tipped over. I suspect raccoons have been sneaking into the garden at night to test to see if the corn is ripe and ready for eating yet by tipping over a few stalks in each plot. I'm worried about what they will do when the corn is ready; will the raccoons simply knock all of the stalks down to get at the ears? I want to eat corn, too!

Some not-quite-ripe ears with beautiful stamens

The cherry tomatoes we planted have grown into beautiful wild children with incredibly tangled branches and leaves. They're covered in lovely yellow blooms and tiny green cherry tomatoes. Hopefully they'll change colors into the lovely sun gold in the next couple of weeks. I can't wait to taste one. A few cherry tomatoes were ripe last week at the Food Pantry Garden here in South Hadley and I got to taste one. It tasted so good I almost started crying, so fresh and so sweet and such a wonderful surprise.

Sumptuously gorgeous

We've been having quite some trouble with the squash plants this summer, but I saw some baby squash growing on some of the plants. Hopefully they will grow to their full size and we'll be able to taste them.

Almost ready!

This weekend is the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) conference, held down the road at UMass Amherst. It's from the 9th to the 11th, and I plan on attending EVERYTHING. Katie is especially excited about a Saturday morning class called "Cheese Tasting and Describing." We'll have to tell you about it next week when we get back!

- Madeleine