Farmer Market This Weekend!

I hadn’t intended to vanish from the blog for the summer, but that is what happened.

This recaps the summer; Cultivate every day for two months, forget to eat, drop nine pounds.

Turns out that tarping the bean acre for a couple of months in spring—-which suppressed weeds beautifully last year—-created a sweet little quackgrass nursery this year. Quackgrass is a scourge that reproduces by underground rhizomes which can grow an inch a day. It’s devilishly hard to control without chemicals.

A wiser farmer may have pondered the one-acre weed nest and concluded Cool, a summer off. I am not that farmer. In the end, the beans prevailed and the quackgrass surrendered. And who am I kidding—a year without beans? Unthinkable.

One happy result of my single-minded weed eradication campaign is that the Alaric beans (Tarbais in France) did great. Another is that I’d forgotten that I’d sown thirty feet of Christmas Limas. It was like finding a $100 bill in a jeans pocket.

Encore Farm returns to the Mill City Farmers Market every Saturday this month: October 7, 14, 21, and 28, 8:00 AM to 1:00 PM. This week I’ll have Bird Egg beans, Peregion, Ireland Creek Annie, and a new variety called Golden Gaucho. (Maybe Alaric.) Also, the Encore Farm production lead, farmer, and marketing office (one and the same) elected to switch the bean packaging from kraft bags to snazzy clear cellophane. The effect is less farmstand, more top shelf.

If that alone isn’t inducement enough, Volume III of the Bean Zine debuts this weekend. Score your copy of this limited edition with any bean purchase.