CSA Week 22

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This Week’s Harvest

Bok Choi

Daikon Radish

Potatoes

Garlic

Sweet Onions

Honeynut Squash

Carrots

Parsley

Tomatoes (last of the year!)

Purple Cauliflower

Salad Mix OR Head Lettuce

Apple Share

Winesap and Gold Rush

Farm News

In addition to our CSA and 2nd Street Market stand we have a third outlet for our produce- wholesale through our Co-Op, Great River Organics. I’ve mentioned our Co-op here before but now I’ll talk about our main contribution to the Co-op. Each of the farms that makes up the Co-op has agreed to grow certain crops so individual farms can grow a lot of just a few vegetables but as a collective we can pull all the different vegetables we grow together and send a nice lengthy list of available produce to grocery stores, restaurants, institutions, etc. Our main crop for the co-op was summer squash. We grew over 20,000 lbs of it for the Co-op!

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Planting the first round of summer squash before a rain storm
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Third round of squash was very productive
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Harvesting the third round in foreground while planting the 4th round in the background

To do this we planted 4 rounds of around 2,500 plants each and picked daily from the end of June to end of September!

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Harvesting squash while the sun begins to set

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Lots of squash to pick!

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weeding the plastic edges with the cultivating tractor

Looking at the fields today you wouldn’t know they produced thousands upon thousands of pounds of squash. We were diligent about mowing the old plants as soon as we were done harvesting to help keep the cucumber beetle and squash bug populations down. We also managed to stay on top of lifting the plastic out.  On Friday we chisel plowed the fields and on Sunday Ben spent all day seeding cover crop and discing to cover the seed, finishing just in time for Monday’s light rain!

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Audrey mows the old zucchini and hopefully kills 1 billion cucumber beetles in the process
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After seeding the fields in cover crop, we run the discs through to smooth the fields and  incorporate the seed

 

Recipes

Garlic Parsley Potatoes

Cantonese Chicken and Bok Choi Fried Rice

Butternut Squash Waffles

Coming Up Next Week (Our Best Guess….) cabbage, sweet potatoes, carrots, acorn squash, potatoes, black Spanish radish, rutabaga, spinach, purple cauliflower and more!