Picadilly Farm distribution

This week is the third-to-last distribution from Piccadilly Farm (only two more this fall), located in southern New Hampshire. I host a CSA distribution for them. Every week they drop off beautiful boxes of freshly harvests vegetables.

This week was an exceptionally nice box, so I took a picture. A bunch of carrots, 2 giant red peppers, onions, some scallions, garlic, purple kale, pea tendrils, lettuce, a couple Delicata squash, and the most amazing sweet potato I have EVER seen.

Seeing the bunch of pea tendrils, which had just started to flower, made me wonder if I should pick mine now or wait and hope for peas. I'll watch the weather forecast, wait and hope.

The lettuce is one of the loveliest I have ever seen. Its green oak leaf, and very dense and full. I hope mine fill out this much!

The sweet potato is incredible. 2 lbs 6 oz! It dwarfs my cute little sweets. I may have to save this one for Thanksgiving. I've never seen any thing like it.

Sunshine yellow watermelon seeds

I got a fantastic yellow fleshed watermelon from Piccadilly Farm. They told me the variety is Sunshine (Johnny's Seeds). I collected seeds from my watermelon, but now that I see its an F1 hybrid, I will throw out the seeds :( and put them on my list to order next year. I hope I can grow this great variety myself.

farm links and parasitic wasps

Its fun to read about real farmers, especially this summer with the bumper crops. Here are a few links I've come across:

Shared Harvest Blog
Riverland CSA Farm (Sunderland MA) newsletter
Waltham Fields newsletters

I emailed yesterday and asked Piccadilly Farm what they did to get rid of corn ear worms this year. Susie told me they are using a parasitic wasp that feeds on the European Corn Borer. Well it sure worked great. I will look into this but I hear it is expensive. Maybe other gardeners would want to share an order. I can't very well keep them in my plot anyway.

I also read in a Waltham Fields news letter (July 26) that they are using these for the Mexican Bean beetle. I wonder if it is the same wasp species as the one that parasitizes the corn worms? Hmmm. I hate those ugly bean beetle larvae. The newsletter says that over a few years, the wasp population should go up and the beans beetle go down. So the wasps don't need to be purchased every year forever. I'm also wondering how far they travel. My plot is only about 1 mile from Waltham Fields.