The newsletters section is up-to-date (through last week) and in an effort to get some more activity happening on the PVF blog/news section, a few new voices will be popping up here and there. The author name will now appear in the same line as the time/date stamp, so you know whose voice you should be imagining.

Directions:

Vienna
Four miles west of Tysons Corner on Route 7 – the stand is on your left.

Purcellville
From Leesburg: Take 7 west for two miles to Route 9. Stay on 9 for five miles and make a right at Berlin Turnpike (287). Make a left on John Wolford.

We are in the midst of the garlic harvest now. Even on our tiny farm, it’s a monumental task. Last fall we planted 500 pounds of garlic cloves, one at a time, by hand, and we covered them with a layer of hay mulch and left them alone for the winter. They grew beautifully. In the first weeks of June we harvested all the garlic curls – a light task – and a few weeks later the green tops turned yellow and the bulbs underground were mature enough to dig.

Our harvest methods are probably the same as they were a millennium or two ago. We stick a big fork in the ground and loosen the soil around each garlic plant, then we bend over and pull on the base of the stem. It’s very simple. A child can do it. The hard part is that the garlic patch goes on and on.

On some farms, the garlic harvest is done with a mechanical digger (we have one out in Purcellville) and the process is completed in one day. On our Vienna farm, we dig garlic for about a week, cleaning each muddy bulb as it comes out of the ground. We dry the garlic in the greenhouse and then fidget with it all season long, trimming and cleaning it again before it goes into the CSA bags.

- Hana

Baskets of fresh heads of garlic in the field wait for transport

Matthew loosens the bed of garlic with a digging fork

Carrie cleans off the harvested garlic cloves

Wow, shares went quickly this year! Please let us know if you have any feedback on the registration process this year.

PVF West is still open for registrations.

Note that this year, there is a two-step process for registering online. Be sure to read more about what we have to offer this year and about Community Supported Agriculture and ecoganic farming.

As a quick reminder, if you use a feed reader, you’ll want to subscribe to our feed. We plan on posting more to the news section of the site this year!

(Updated 2/8/08: PVF East is sold out!)

(Updated 2/26/08: PVF West is sold out!)

Please leave your comments here.

I did have to take away the comment/rating feature of the recipes, though, as it was getting overrun with spam. I’ll have to comb through, find the real comments, delete the rest, and then spam-proof the comment form before bringing it back.

The regular schedule will resume next week for Wednesday pick-ups.

We will have an early bird discount in effect until March 1, and we think we could be sold out by early March. We will close the CSA when we sell 400 shares.

We will have pick-up locations at our farms in Vienna and Purcellville, and will also drop off in Herndon, Leesburg, Arlington, Falls Church, Alexandria, and Bethesda. Folks who don’t pick up at the farms will also pay $3/week for delivery (or $48 for the summer).

I’ll be doing some tweaking of the recipes section over the next week or two and just generally cleaning things up around here. Let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions.

For those of you that got registered in time, those veggies are coming next week!