This Week’s Harvest
Sweet Potatoes
Potatoes
Head Lettuce
Cabbage
Garlic
Broccoli
Farm News
The cold weather has settled in and it sure is welcome. We are in the final stretch of the season; bundling up to stay warm as we put the farm to rest. About half of these final few CSA boxes will come from storage crops and half are still growing outside. The cold weather sweetens the greens (we are still waiting for it to sweeten the carrots. We tried them last week and the flavor just isn’t as good as it could be) and much of our brassica field can survive into November. These days we wait until the frost has passed and then harvest for the rest of morning. In the afternoons we clean up the fields we are done with.
This year brings a Mile Creek Farm first of having all of our plastic mulch and t-posts and twine and wooden stakes and drip tape all cleaned up and out of the fields before Nov. 1. This is great news because it means we can spread cover crop over much of the farm. Now we are waiting on a little more rain to really germinate some of the rye we got in last week. The fields we sowed earlier in the fall are coming up great though. The farm is so beautiful to me now. Probably because it is so clean and organized!
With just the task of garlic to planted left, our field work is really wrapping up for the year. With a dry week forecasted, it will not be a problem to get the garlic in this week. Next week we will focus on getting root crops harvested and into the coolers. We have turnips, rutabaga, radishes, and storage cabbage that can handle temperatures in the 30s but not extended periods of lows in the 20s, so we’ll want to make sure we get them harvested before some deep freezes hit us.
Recipes
Pan Roasted Radishes and Italian Style Greens (use mustard greens in place of spinach)
Chick Peas with Sweet Potatoes and Mustard Greens
Cabbage, Potatoes, Rutabaga and Kielbasa
Coming Up Next Week (Our Best Guess…….) Rutabaga, Sweet Potatoes, Brussel Sprouts, Kale, Escarole, Potatoes, Kossak Kohlrabi, Garlic, and more!