In this week’s box:
Sweet potatoes
Red Leaf lettuce
Onions
Bok choi
Turnip greens with scarlet salad turnips (cook the turnip greens like you would mustard greens or any other tender leafy greens)
Slicer Tomatoes
Sungold Cherry Tomatoes
Garlic bulbs
No fruit share this week, but it will return next week!
Don’t forget to mark your calendars for our end of the season potluck on Sunday, September 30.
Farm notes:
This week on the farm we have been digging sweet potatoes. Sweet potato vines form a thick mat of vegetation that easily fills in the six feet that there are between rows of plants. So before you can even find the potatoes it is necessary to pull away enough of the vines that you can find the potatoes easily. Fortunately they grow in clusters where the original slip was planted. After the vines are pulled out of the way the clusters need to be loosened in order to pull the potatoes without breaking or damaging them. We loosen each cluster with a shovel being careful not to get too close and cut potatoes. Finally we can pull the potatoes from the ground. We then repeat the process for the next cluster (there are 800 feet of sweet potatoes planted 12-18 inches apart) and so on and so forth.
In addition to digging sweet potatoes we are also trying to find time to get all the fields cleaned up and planted to a winter cover crop of cereal rye and hairy vetch. Fall cleanup is especially important this year because we are going to be doubling the number of acres that we are growing on next season (we are adding an additional four acres). We are going to be doubly busy in the spring getting everything ready to be planted so we won’t have time cleanup this year’s messes next year! With this additional acreage we will actually be able to simplify our operation because we will no longer be double cropping (growing multiple crops in the same place) any of our land. This will give us moe flexibility to incorporate cover crops into our fertility program, and ultimately to have healthier and more productive soil.
Recipes
Braised bok choi with tomatoes and gruyere
Sweet potato and greens in coconut curry(use turnip greens in place of mustard greens)