This week’s box included: sweet corn, cantaloupe, peppers, cucumbers (salad and kirby), zucchini, swiss chard, white onions, eggplant, tomatoes, beets, summer squash. You can see a photo that can help with identification on our Facebook page or check out our weekly video on Instagram.
Need storage instructions? Visit our fruit & veggie home pages. Click on the pic and a new page opens with storage instructions and a list of recipes curated by Conne over the years.
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Happy Independence Day! Conne is out of town this week. Here’s an update from the farm instead.
What an appropriate day for the sweet corn to make its first appearance of the year! It’s looking beautiful, but this is still a good time to mention that there is a little pest called the corn ear worm that we encounter with this crop. Because we practice organic farming and don’t resort to using the organic-certified pesticides – hey, it’s a mindset – there’s always a chance that the corn ear worm can make an appearance, especially later in the corn season. Most cases the damage doesn’t go beyond the tip of the ear. We recommend lopping off the top as soon as you get your box home, and tossing the tips to the compost pile or the chickens, if you have them.
We certainly had our trials yesterday with this week’s box! We certainly appreciate the flexibility that subscribers showed toward the changes in delivery times this week, especially those of you who pick up in Acworth. We knew that we wanted to pack early this week so that our packing shed staff could have the day off to spend with their families, but we left the delivery decision to the last minute.
Here’s a little behind-the-scenes look at the mayhem:
The day started with one of our refrigerated trucks losing its transmission on the drive to pick up produce from one of our partner family farms. Fortunately, Wes & Graham hadn’t gone far. They turned back, parked the truck at the end of our road, and Charlotte fetched them back to our farm. They drove off again in a convoy of two separate smaller trucks.
We jammed through packing after Wes & Graham returned and decided to make a go for delivering everything to every pickup location Monday evening so that our delivery staff could enjoy the holiday too. That was the biggest ask of Amanda, our driver who had already completed a day of meat deliveries to Atlanta restaurants earlier in the day with her two small kids in the cab.
Amanda left the farm at 6pm with what we thought were enough produce boxes for ten pickup locations. Thankfully, her kids’ father picked up the kids at her first stop in Calhoun. On the road again, Amanda decided to do her route in reverse so that she could make her rendezvous with our Perimeter area delivery person Sam as early as possible. Another surprise — they discovered Sam’s brake lights weren’t working. Thankfully an extra fuse fixed the lights, especially since it was getting dark and rain was moving into the city.
The unfortunate impact of reversing the route was to move the Acworth delivery to last instead of first. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue. But last week our Acworth host Maia alerted us that her neighborhood is mayhem on July 4th. How much mayhem? The National Guard closes the neighborhood to traffic mayhem. We proactively notified the Acworth subscribers that boxes would be ready to pick up Monday evening by 7pm. Now it looked more like 9:30pm-ish. Maia was cool as a cucumber fielding calls from the subscribers who also stayed heroically patient in the face of these changes.
Meanwhile, Charlotte and Graham were on their way to their 5 pickup locations. They drove through the storm front raking Atlanta in the big truck, unloading in Grant Park just before the rain hit there. (See a punchy Graham describe the weekly box contents while the wind swirls.) On they went to Ormewood, Chop Shop, Decatur, more.
Sam got a surprise when he encountered the construction blocking the normal entrance at Blue Heron Nature Preserve, storm clouds swirling there too. A quick call and he figured it out (drive around the first barricade to the second barricade, etc.)
Amanda made it safely to Brookhaven, Medlock, Vahi, Morningside and reached Acworth at 10pm. The last of a series of email messages were sent to subscribers who all picked up that evening, before the National Guard arrived. We were short one box, however. Charlotte & Graham, who were on their way home at this point, turned back into the city, fetched one of the boxes from Chop Shop, and delivered it to Acworth on their way back to the farm.
Amanda returned safely to the farm by 11pm. Charlotte and Graham? They arrived home around midnight.
We hope that you are all enjoying the holiday today! Thank you for being part of our family’s local produce delivery scheme. It’s not easy to buck the system. You make it all work and we’re grateful for you all.
Your friends at Riverview Farms