Stone's Throw Farm

My parents, Jean and Craig, shown here loading one of the last boxes of green tomatoes into the van on Saturday (and fighting over how to hold it? Okay, okay, it was a posed shot.), arrived Wednesday evening and endured two days of “cold” rain before finally getting a sunny day on Saturday. I put “cold” in quotation marks because it’s all relative and I’m very aware that it will soon be much colder than 50 degrees. It was certainly cold weather in which to be working outside when your coveralls are soaked through, however, which happened to my parents on Thursday. I was at work at the Food Farm and they were hard at work at Stone’s Throw Farm when it started raining for real. I could say something about rain gear being available, but I won’t!

We harvested about 200 pounds of green tomatoes, I’m guessing. Nice big San Marzano Romas — a shame they didn’t have time to ripen. It was worth a shot, I guess, but I’ll be trying some other varieties next year. My dad wanted to harvest all the green tomatoes, even the one with “blem-o’s,” — as my parents kept referring to bad spots, or blemishes — but I wouldn’t let him. I’d rather have them rot right there in the field than in boxes in the hoophouse!

I’m glad we at least had one nice day together, and it was great to have their help getting ready for the first frost Saturday night. My mom picked the last of the basil for me (it is now pesto in the freezer) and my dad helped me create an action plan for replacing the starter on the tractor, which burned up Saturday afternoon — quite timely, considering I wouldn’t have had a clue what was wrong if he hadn’t been there. We also pulled the squash and melon plants and the black plastic mulch that was covering those beds, so that’s a good job done.