THIS WEEK’S GROWER NOTES

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BAIN HOME GARDENS: Hello market friends! We hope all of you came away safe and sound thru the weather last week. Besides an issue with siding, we are all clear here at Bain Home Gardens.  We did however lose our volunteer watermelon vines. We are not quite sure how to feel about that since we didn’t officially plant them anyway. We went ahead and pulled the melons from the vine and uprooted the vines. The vines of course went to the compost but as you can see the melons didn’t quite mature. We sampled one yesterday and it was surprisingly SWEET! The rest will be sampled as well. Tasty ones will be diced, seeded, then frozen for smoothies. Yummy!

Perhaps it was the storms or the season either way our family has suffered some allergy issues. Our usual routine is local honey with lemon in tea as a quick remedy. So to the pantry we went only to find just a teaspoon of honey in our jar from Mary Bees! This was very disappointing. I’m personally looking forward to the market opening to grab another jar. Have you tried them out? Heads up! It’s allergy season for the Wiregrass area. Please do not get caught off guard like we did.

In other news, we have mounting excitement about upcoming harvests! With weather being such a determining factor, admittedly there is a bit of nervous energy too. We are working on channeling that into a positive enthusiastic vibe. We will
have new produce coming just in time for the fall market. For the most current updates like and follow our page on Facebook, @bainhomegrowngoodness. Keep an eye on us as we continually endeavor to bring quality produce from our family to yours!

HAWKINS HOMESTEAD FARM: We are very happy and thankful that our family and our animals all made it safely through Hurricane Irma. We had some tree limbs fall and our plants definitely took a beating but thankfully no real damage was done. Hopefully all of you were safe as well. We are still praying for and will continue to pray for all those affected by not only this storm, but Harvey, and those affected by the earthquake in Mexico. So many have lost so much and sometimes it’s easy to forget when you’re not directly affected.

Sad to say we lost our sweet potato plants. With all the rain, most were mush and some were stunted. Sometimes when things look good above ground, you never know what’s happening below. We will try again next year.

Fall planting has started late for us but we have started organic broccoli, spinach, collards, and kale!

Update: If all goes well, we should expect some chicks this weekend! We will be sure to let you know how the hatch went.

Horton’s Farm Instead of driving to Orlando on Saturday, Sept 9 to visit the new grand-baby like originally planned we spent the day preparing for the arrival of Irma. The biggest job of the day was to tackle the Leaning Tower of Beeza. The Leaning Tower is/was one of my strongest hives and gradually started leaning due to the weight of the honey my bees stored upstairs! Needless to say, the idea of a hurricane blowing that thing over, scattering my sweet bees and ruining all that honey . . . well, that just wasn’t going to happen!

The long and short of it is that the Leaning Tower got moved to a new more secure foundation with a new bottom board and sturdier boxes. It’s new name is the Beeluxe Condo. Best of all, we got 3 boxes of honey from it to extract. As in . . during the storm. That’s right, Ros spent Monday extracting honey old school with no electricity. Besides the sticky sweet deliciousness and keeping my mind off family in Florida and trying not to thing about what was going on outdoors, we were blessed with more COMB HONEY than we’ve ever produced here thanks to those hardworking little girls. We hope you enjoy it!