Hamlet Organic Garden

All 2008 members old and new, wise, young, or otherwise, are to attend the annual member meeting of the Hamlet Organic Garden on Saturday May 17th at 10:00 am.  Coffee and fresh baked goods will be served (if you want to contribute call Ilene at 286-2513).  We will discuss the state of the farm, how our C.S.A. program works, introduce and elect new board members (all members are eligible to serve on the board, nominations can be sent to Board President Katherine Fritz at board@hamletorganicgarden.org).  Meet your fellow shareholders, meet the farmers, take a tour of the farm, get to know your farm!  The Pick-up coordinator training session will immediately follow the meeting.  Interested members can also stay after the meeting for work hours on the farm.
The Annual Member Meeting takes place in the Red Barn at the H.O.G. on 319 Beaver Dam Road, Brookhaven.  See you there!
-Sean and Jill

Mark your calendars for the annual HOG Mother’s Day Weekend Plant Sale!  This year should be bigger and better than ever!  The HOG is teaming up with Phil Altomare of Sacred Gardens to bring you a wide selection of organically grown perennial and annual flowers, bedding plants, vegetable starts for your home garden, medicinal herbs, and exotic perennial and annuals you won’t find at the garden center!

We’ll be at the Red Barn Friday May 9th through Sunday May 11th from 10am-4pm.

We are searching for pickup coordinators for the 2008 season at all our pickup locations!  This position involves working a 2 hour shift during the pickup, checking people in, straightening the produce, refilling the baskets, and cleaning up at the end. This position counts towards your work hours! You must be able to lift bushels full of produce to work this position!

Hours are available at the farm Tuesday and Friday, and on Wednesdays in Bayshore and Seatuket from mid May until the end of October, with the first shift being 3-5pm and the second being 5-7pm.Anyone interested in signing up, please email jill@hamletorganicgarden.org or call Jill at 286-7068. There is a mandatory orientation meeting before you can begin working!

IT’S ALIVE!!! It took about twenty throws of the switches, but after innumerable tweaks and reconfigurations, the little electric motor whirred to life yesterday afternoon, fittingly enough, during occassional rumbles of thunder and lightning.  With a lot of help from Pete Clement, our Allis Chalmers G cultivating tractor is gasoline-free, running quiet and clean on electric power.  Thanks Pete! And thanks to all our members who payed higher on the sliding scale which provided the funds to make this conversion possible!  Check out the details on the Tractor Conversion Page on the sidebar!

What wonderful weather! The rain showers have been watering the peas and the sun shines often enough to let us get out and prepare the ground for the rush of planting on the way.  This week we planted asparagus.  First we dug two trenches, 1 foot deep and 400 feet long.  Then applied a heaping helping of composted manures and set out the baby asparagus plants.  Now we wait, three years for the plants to establish themselves.  Steve and Bryan are glad we won’t need any more trench digging for a while, and starting in 2011, we can all welcome spring with the exquisite taste of just-cut asparagus!  Glutamate is the compound in asparagus that gives it such a rich, pleasing flavor.  Glutamate is the fifth flavor, ‘umami’, besides sweet, sour, bitter, and salty.  It increases dramatically in plant foods like asparagus, tomatoes, and corn as they ripen naturally, but breaks down quickly.  Maybe that’s why fresh food tastes so much better!

  Jill and I spent the last two days at the farm, spreading manure and tilling in the cover crop residues on our first beds to be planted.  The cool soil turned over dark and moist, just the way we want it to look.  By August it will be baked and bleached by the sun but in the spring, the soil has that crumbly, wholesome look that drives farmers wild.  In the following weeks we will be putting in peas, lettuce, and onions.

Another sign of spring is bird activity, killdeer and canada geese in the fields, robins of course, stealing our earthworms, towhees rummaging in the woods; I even watched a sharp-shinned hawk catch a red-winged blackbird in mid-flight!

Thanks to our friend Sylvia and her annual CSA article in Newsday, our answering machine is filling up with requests for information from prospective members.  If you are one of these people, please take a good look around our website before you call, it will probably answer many of your questions, and save a lot of phone tag.  Friday pick-up shares at the farm are sold out.  If you live in the Setauket or Bay Shore areas, our pick-up sites in those locations still have shares available.  Also, if you want to pick up at the farm on Tuesdays there are still some shares left.  You can email us at mail@hamletorganicgarden.org if you have any questions!

The 2008 season has officially begun! This past monday we planted over 30,000 onion seeds in trays inside our woodstove-heated greenhouse! Sweet onions, red onions, yellow storage onions, and shallots were planted by Sean, Jill, and Bryan with a lot of help from Jill’s mom who was visiting.  Onion plants grow new leaves until the summer solstice, after which they stop adding new leaves and the existing leaves swell to make the familiar bulb.  But for now, you can see the first germinating onions just popping out of the soil mix in the photo above on the right.