Last week we harvested our garlic. Since they are planted in the fall, for a July harvest, this was our first garlic crop. It was a pleasant surprise, because some of the plants looked a little puny, but the bulbs look awesome - fat and heavy! Here's a picture of them hanging up to dry.

Here's the one onion flower that our farm produced, I've been told by Alice that she cut it down when she harvested the first round of onions.
I've uploaded this and pictures of the last few months onto facebook, you can see them here.

Now it is definitely summer. Spring lasted a long time and we had an endless supply of spinach and lettuce, but now we have summer clouds, summer storms, and fireflies. Martin was out the other night taking pictures of the fireflies (there should be a few more at the end of his photo album) before taking off on another cross country trip. We'll be glad to see him when he gets back. (Some of his other pictures show off the bugs better, but this one shows off the farm.)

Update
Here's what Nicholas sent out to the list, and i pretty much copied it word for word.

This is kindof my pet project for the summer. The plan is to grow, and then plant seedlings directly into a cover crop, avoiding tillage in the spring when we're most likely to have major water erosion. In this case, we planted winter rye last fall, and then this spring we scythed it down and planted various brassica seedlings (broccoli, kohlrabi, cabbage, brussell sprouts) into it. A big picture of the test area is shown above.

We have started delivering! On Friday we brought boxes to our first 4 members and also the food pantry in Story City, and tomorrow we will be harvesting in the rain to bring food for the rest of our CSA.

Our greenhouse: It’s been a learning experience, and I’m confident that we’ll need to keep making adjustments, but our greenhouse is up and operational. The modest size of 20’X12’ seems hard to fill with seedlings, but should be easy to fill with tomatoes and some fall greens. For now, it also makes a nice picnic area on cold windy days.
here's some pictures of our serious workers, Irene, Steve, and Nate:

Saturday 4/25

We got most of our potatoes in on Good Friday, and the last few on Saturday morning. All in all, with the help of a big Friday crew, and the steadfast work of my mom, Barbara and Nicholas all weekend, we got all the potatoes and onions in the ground.

So our bees died this summer, Chris talked some kind of expert (maybe an apiarist?), and based on the fact that there was still substantial amounts of capped honey left in the hive, and there wasn't any evidence of foulbrood or other major pathogens/pests, we think they froze to death. I put some more pictures on facebook. If you want to see our new bees, we're having workday tomorrow April 10 after noon, and Saturday, April 11 for most of the day.

Nic