Farmer Kurt’s Field Notes July 17, 2026 SMOKE in the Air!
Smoke from Canadian wildfires severely affected the air quality at SLF. The farm has an eerie glow from the hazy conditions.
On Thursday morning, we woke up thinking a heavy fog had settled over the farm. As soon as we stepped outside, though, we realized it wasn’t fog at all. It was SMOKE! The air smelled like a campfire.
Smoke from the Canadian wildfires had drifted into northern Ohio, and by mid-morning, you could actually feel it in your lungs. Unfortunately, Thursday is one of our busiest days of the week. We were harvesting vegetables, packing fruit shares and online store orders, and trying to stay on top of the never-ending list of summer field work.
Our biggest concern quickly became our crew.
Since then, we’ve been trying to minimize everyone’s exposure by cutting workdays short whenever possible and looking into better personal protective equipment. I know many of them would rather keep working (there’s certainly no shortage of work to do!), but their health comes first.
Farmer Kurt has been helping the crew out since the smoky conditions began, trying to get their jobs finished earlier to get them indoors.
The challenge doesn’t stop when we head home, either. Our farmhouse doesn’t have central air, so we’ve been doing our best to keep the smoke outside while we wait for some air filters to arrive. It’s made us realize that many of our crew members are facing the same challenge at home.
We’re all hoping this is a short-lived event. But it’s also prompted some conversations around the farm: What if smoky summers become more common? Like so many things in farming, we’re learning to adapt to conditions we never expected. We’d certainly appreciate your prayers for clear skies, healthy lungs, and wisdom as we care for our crew.
Despite the haze, the season keeps rolling forward.
This week the crew planted another succession of cabbage. It always amazes me that while you’re enjoying vegetables in this week’s CSA box, we’re already planting crops you’ll likely be eating months from now.
Josiah earned a new assignment this week: hilling the leeks. If you’ve ever wondered why leeks have those long, beautiful white stems, this is why. As the plants grow, we use specialized equipment to gently pull soil up around the base of each row. Covering the stems keeps sunlight from reaching them, creating the tender white portion that everyone loves.
The melon vines are just gorgeous!
He also spent time cultivating around our melon fields — a job that requires a careful touch. The melons are growing on plastic mulch, so there’s very little room for error. One wrong move and you could damage the vines.
Thankfully, everything looks fantastic. In fact, the melon patch may be one of the prettiest places on the farm right now. The vines are lush, healthy, and spreading beautifully across the rows. If all continues to go well, we’ll be enjoying melons sometime in August.
Another exciting milestone is just around the corner…
Sweet corn!
The crop looks excellent this year, and if everything stays on schedule, we’re hoping to have the first ears in your CSA boxes next week.
Our parents grow the sweet corn, while we help manage the crop throughout the season. Every year it’s one of the vegetables everyone waits for, and I think we’re finally getting close.
This week, we finally composted the remaining purple top turnips and winter radishes. They’ve had an incredible run, but they were beginning to show their age, and honestly… we needed the cooler space.
The crew rips open the bags of turnps and radishes and throws them into the compost.
Summer squash is arriving by the wagonload now, and before long we’ll be filling those coolers with sweet corn, melons, and everything else that defines summer eating.
Corinna has spent much of the week working on something completely different. Our new Farmer’s Bag Toledo program officially opens for signup this Monday!
She put this all together in a matter of 3 intense days. She’s been building the website sales page, writing emails, creating marketing materials, writing product descriptions, adding additional tech stacks to the ecommerce platform, and preparing everything for launch.
Our hope is to serve families in Toledo by making fresh, local produce more affordable through generous community funding. We’ll spend the next couple of weeks seeing whether there is enough interest to fill the first season before our August 7 launch date.
We’re excited… and maybe just a little nervous. Launching something new always feels that way.
One challenge we’re continuing to navigate is this year’s fruit share.
The late spring frost devastated much of Ohio’s peach crop, and it’s affecting everyone. Even local orchards are bringing in peaches from outside the region just to stock their own farm stands. That means we’re having to think much more creatively than usual about where we source fruit.
While we always prefer to offer fruit grown as close to home as possible, this year simply isn’t normal. We’re doing our best to find the highest-quality regional fruit we can, even if it means it comes from farther away than we’d like.
Thanks for your patience as we work through another curveball Mother Nature has thrown our way. We thought about cancelling the rest of the fruit share for about 5 minutes, then decided against it. It should just affect us here for a couple weeks — before the melons and apples start rolling in, which are not affected. Peaches are one of the core mainstays of the middle-season fruit bags, so it will be hard to replace that.
If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably heard about the recent food-borne illness outbreak linked to Cyclospora, a parasite that has sickened people across several Midwestern states. Over the past week, we’ve received a number of phone calls and emails from customers asking if our produce is safe to eat.
First of all, thank you for asking. We appreciate that you trust us enough to bring your concerns directly to us.
Food safety is something we take incredibly seriously. We are food safety certified, and we have written protocols that guide everything from harvest and packing to employee hygiene and produce handling. In light of this recent outbreak, we’ve actually taken the opportunity to provide additional refresher training for our crew, reviewing proper handwashing, sanitation procedures, and the important role each of us plays in protecting the food we grow.
Planting cabbage this week
Events like this are also a reminder of something we’ve believed for a long time: there’s real value in knowing your farmer.
When you buy from a local farm, you know where your food came from. You know the people who planted it, harvested it, packed it, and loaded it into your car. If you ever have a question, you know exactly who to call. We’re grateful for the trust you’ve placed in our family, and we’ll continue doing everything we can to grow food that’s handled with the care your family deserves.
Finally, we’re trying a fun little experiment in the online store this month. CHICKEN CUTS!
Many of you know Anderson Farms provides the chickens for our monthly meat share. This season, they ended up with a few extra birds each month, so rather than let those go unsold, we’re going to offer a limited selection of individual chicken cuts through our online store.
If customers place a store order containing chicken, Anderson Farms will pack that part of the order for us– fresh and frozen, and then customers can simply pick it up from their trailer during their regular farm pickup.
We’ll see how it goes! I have a feeling those will sell out fast, so be sure you check the store around noon on Saturday for first dibs.
Even with smoke hanging over the fields, the farm keeps moving forward. And every week reminds us how much of farming is learning to adapt to whatever nature hands us. We’re grateful for healthy crops, a dedicated crew, and a community that understands farming doesn’t always follow the script.
Here’s hoping next week’s weather forecast includes a little more sunshine… and a lot less smoke.
Until next week,
— Farmer Kurt