Sprout Farm Newsletter Sept. 19, 2026 open 9-5 daily sproutfarm.net

Hello Everyone,

The mornings are getting chilly and the guys at Sauchuk Farm, coming from tropical climates, are wearing three layers of clothes and gloves, just to pick corn. They finish putting the corn in my truck by 8:00 every morning and before the corn maze opens up on weekends, so they're always on the go. The three inches of rain that we had last Sunday made everything look healthy and now we have to mow the lawn, again. I don't think we will see any water restrictions in the near future. I wouldn't pay attention to them anyway because we still have our well.

When I asked Jay if he wanted to say anything to the customers he almost jumped out of his chair, “We have tomatoes. Tell them we have eight 25lb boxes of tomatoes. Each box is $50.00. “ That's a good deal. So, if you want to make tomato sauce, now is the time. We have peppers but no onions, just shallots. The tomatoes are beautiful because they are exclusively grown in the greenhouses and have very little disease or competition with weeds. Ken takes care of them and that means I haven't even been in those houses for months. We're still picking beans and Ken is still planting and harvesting lettuce. We will be getting fresh cranberries starting Friday but we are unable to get the dried cranberries. I think they made an exception for us for years but now Decas is going by the book or better said the distributor, and we can't make the minimum from some guy on the North shore so I said, well, I won't say what I said but in the end, there will be no dried cranberries from Decas.

We have seven varieties of apples at this time but that is subject to change. We have Bartlett pears next to the Honey Crisp apples. Bulb fennel is back for a little while.

I got used to ignoring the tilther when I walked by it by the house to the point that I forgot it was there. I finally took it for a spin down the walkway for the new cucumber plants and it did an excellent job of getting rid of the small weeds without kicking up a lot of dirt and damaging the new plants.

The mums are doing well and still selling in the bud stage. At $5.99 for a 9” mum plant you can see why they are popular. The hanging basket mums are only $9.99. There is only one plant per pot but they sure fill up the space. Speaking of space, at the end of last spring, we took one of those empty cedar planters that had been hanging around for years, dumped a bag of soil into it, and dropped in a sad looking hanging basket (without the pot). It took a few weeks for it to adjust to its new container but look at it now. It only had three plants in it but it fills up the space and spills over so that you can't see the planter any more. Now that's keeping life simple.

The swamp milk weed did its job and now they're almost down to the stem. If the Monarch butterfly caterpillars didn't eat the leaves, the aphids did but now we have Monarch butterflies fluttering around. Some of them will have a short life as their wings did not expand evenly but for those that went through the transition as expected, they're bright and beautiful. I saw one fat caterpillar chomping down the leaves from one of the last healthy plants. They should all come to an end at about the same time.

The kitten report: We are down to two kittens; Smidgit and Goldie or better known as Chunk. James told me to look at Goldie's teeth and sure enough there was a loose tooth, hanging off to the side of the jaw but not causing any problems when it came to eating. Mashpee Vet on Great Neck Road North was great and we were in the office within an hour because they had a cancellation. They pulled the tooth and cleaned out the hole and kept saying how beautiful she was. I was asking when do they recommend kittens get neutered and they said, 'At six months old.' It took me awhile to realize that they were referring to Goldie as a girl, not a boy. I hadn't bother to look closely because the vast majority of orange cats are male so I was shocked to find out we have a girl. That explains why she is so affectionate. She is bright, fluffy and needs a flea treatment. The vet recommends, Revolution rather than the older better known brands that don't seem to work as well as this new one.

That's all the news we have for now. Stop by and see what we have growing for you.

 

Jay and Phyllis Sprout