In your share this week:
- French Fillet Beans
- Sweet Walla Walla Onions
- Salad Mix
- Leeks
- Red Table Beets
- Red Norland Potatoes
- Tomatoes
- Green Bell Peppers
- Huganrian Wax Peppers
- Cauliflower
- Cucumbers - for Jackson folks (who missed out on something else a few weeks ago)
At this point in the season I will no longer be listing that any certain crop is being given for the last time. With the change in the weather especially, there are no gaurantees with anything. Each week brings new circumstances and I find myself adjusting our harvest plans often based on the weather, time, workers, and the overal quantity or quality of individual crops. We still have a wide variety of crops available to harvest and will do our best to give an abundance of vegetables through the end of the month.
Our last CSA delivery for the season will be on Tuesday, October 25th.
The big news this past week was the SNOW! We woke to a few inches of snow here on Thursday morning and then I watched it snow quite heavily the rest of the day as I went about getting hoopes and row covers out to help protect the tomatoes, salad and other sensitive crops in the greenhouses. That night Shain and I had to evaluate our situation to determine what work could/should be done and if there was anything we could harvest in the cold weather to get a jump on the CSA shares for this week. We opted to harvest all the remaining French fillet beans in greenhouse 2, pulling the plants and tossing them in the pig pen. The plants were loaded! Walking around the farm on Friday, the snow was nearly to the top of my work boots, which by my estimations means we had a foot of snow on the ground! It was a little depressing thinking about all the crops that were frozen or othewise finished off for the season, especially the late rows of peas that had just filled out and were ready to pick a day or two before the snow fell. There's one thing this farm has taught me, that I can't do everything and sometimes I just need to let go...(but I like peas).
As the season draws to an end, we invite our CSA members to come glean extra produce from the farm. These are crops which the quantity availalbe is not enough for the CSA, the quality is a little lower than our standards, or the time needed to pick through the crop is no longer practical for our needs. If this is something you'd be interested in doing, please contact me directly. People who are not associated with our farm are also welcome to come glean, but will need to exchange labor or pay for the food they harvest.
A few odds and ends:
In a previous newsletter I stated Shain would be planting a fall crop of spinach. This did not happen. There wasn't enough space in the greenhouse for spinach and salad, so he asked a few CSA members and opted to go with planting the more popular crop - salad mix.
Much earlier in the season I mentioned that our leek crop for the year would be very small, if any at all. We had received a letter from our supplier that they had cancelled out leek order due to nation wide crop failures. We searched high and low for another source but could not find one. We ended up planting leeks from seed (instead of the usual transplants) with the hopes they would grow large enough to harvest by the fall. It was very confusing at the time, because just that week we planted rows of transplants that looked like leeks, but the letter said they had cancelled our leek order. At this same time, we were also wondering where were the red onions we had ordered. We guessed the supplier had incorrectly sent us a different variety of white onions instead of the red onions and that must have been what we planted. About half way through the season both Shain and I kept looking at these rows of "whatevers" (onions, we had guessed). They looked like leeks. They were leeks. Who knows whatever happened to the red onions we ordered. And the leeks we planted from seed are now barely as big as the transplants we put in earlier this spring.
I also wrote before that this year we started raising meat birds to sell. Our plan was to announce their availability for purchase to our CSA members here on this blog just a few weeks before each batch was ready to butcher. We had no idea we'd receive such a high level of interest. All the available chickens were reseved well in advance, some even before they came to the farm as chicks. They were gone before I could even mention it again here. In an effort to be more organized and fair to our potential customers, we have decided to go to a standard waiting list method of distribution. If you want chickens, I'll literally put your name down as the next person on the list. When the chickesn are ready to sell, I'll call the first person, then the next, and go down from there. We hope to raise more birds next year. The first 50 birds raised in 2012 are already reserved.
Have a great week and ENJOY your veggies.
Tara
well this blog is great i love reading your articles.
Posted by: Hermes Kelly | February 16, 2012 at 11:32 AM