by milecreekfarm

CSA Week 20

This Week’s Harvest

  • Sweet Potatoes
  • Bok Choi
  • Caraflex Cabbage
  • Cilantro
  • Beets with Greens
  • Red Round Radishes
  • Cippolini Onions (grown by Shared Legacy Farms)
  • Arugula
  • Tomatoes
  • Sweet Italian Peppers

Farm News

The major tasks of harvesting sweet potatoes and regular potatoes can be checked off the to do list! These two crops made up 50 beds and any spare time over the last 4 weeks was spent harvesting them. We had some equipment malfunctions, some cold weather scares, and the super dry soil made for less than ideal harvesting conditions, but we got it done! And we have bulk bins full of produce that we will use in the final CSA boxes, the extended CSA season and for our co-op as well.

This week we will focus on cleaning up the fields–taking down tomato stakes and twine, pulling up the plastic from the plasticulture beds, cleaning up drip tape and row cover. Then next week it is back to bulk harvesting with carrots, beets, winter radishes, turnips and rutabagas. Grateful for last night’s rain to help size up these final crops of the year.

Harvesting Bayou Bells
Bulk bins of sweet potatoes double stacked in our barn for storage

Employee Spotlight: Nate

This year we were pleased to have Nate join us for a second season. While we didn’t get to know Nate until last year, he has been familiar with our vegetables long before that. His parents joined our CSA the very first year we offered it! The sungold cherry tomatoes in particular left an impression on Nate. This year Nate got to delve into tractor work. He was the main driver for planting days and harvesting done with the conveyor. He also cultivated, mowed, dropped fertilizer, lifted plastic and more! Nate also comes to us with welding experience and we have taken advantage of that skill set!

Nate drives a wagon full of cabbage
Nate cultivates the potatoes and drops fertilizer from the front end at the same time

In addition to the hard work put in all week, Nate went above and beyond and helped us harvest summer squash on Sundays. He enlisted his partner’s help and so during squash season, Nate and Cheri volunteered (!) their Sunday mornings to help us harvest hundreds of pounds of squash! We were SO grateful and can’t really imagine how exhausted we would be if we had had to harvest solo over the weekends.

A squash load Nate and Cheri helped harvest

Nate served our county as a US Army combat engineer veteran. More recently he has been on trail maintenance crews for our National Parks and closer to home worked as a welder. Nate also does custom wood, metal and knife working and you can find his work following The Black Squirrel Workshop on instagram. He made us an awesome sign for the farm which we are very much looking forward to getting hung up soon! We are grateful that Nate’s love of the outdoors and interest in homesteading as landed him at Mile Creek!

Recipes

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess…) beets, sweet potatoes, radishes, napa cabbage, cilantro, carrots, turnips, sweet onions, arugula, potatoes!