This Week’s Harvest

• Napa Cabbage
• Beets with green tops
• Radishes
• Arugula
• Salad Mix
• Green Tomatoes
• Cilantro
• Potatoes
• Sweet Potatoes
• Peppers (mix of bell and sweet Italian) last of the season!
• Cauliflower

Farm News

After another big push this week, it might just be that we are turning the corner to calmer days and dinners at a proper dinner time! On Friday we prepared ourselves for the killing frost. We have a large piece of row cover that can cover 7 beds so we dragged it across the farm and covered our salad mix, head lettuce, spinach and cilantro beds. These are the most tender crops we have left in the fields and a light frost is something they can handle, but a hard freeze can damage them. The wind was really roaring but we needed to cover the beds when we still had employees to help us. We wrestled with the wind and got the row cover to stay in the general right area. Then when it was dark and the wind died down, I went back out and made sure the cover was over all the beds.

We also harvested our remaining summer crops. We picked all the sweet peppers with color and any decent sized bell pepper for the CSA shares. We cleaned out the roma tomatoes and harvested green tomatoes, also for the CSA share. These green tomatoes are so big and beautiful because they came off a brand new planting. Farmer “oops” as we admit that we planted our third and final tomato planting too late. Perhaps in a warmer fall they would have ripened for us, but we won’t be taking any chances and have adjusted the seeding chart for next year!

We worked over the weekend too, washing a large sweet potato order and planting winter rye cover crop ahead of the rain. After the oat cover crop failure, we are glad that it did end up raining and the rye should come up great! Ben also started getting the beds that we will be planting garlic in ready. We’ll aim to plant garlic at the end of October. They are going in beds that housed summer squash this year. Earlier in the week, we pulled out the plastic mulch that the squash grew on. On Sunday Ben had to chisel plow the field and re-hill new beds. We still have to shape and till the beds, but we don’t generally like doing this step before a heavy rain. The stage we got the beds to on Sunday is what we were hoping to accomplish. Can’t wait to update you on the garlic– especially since we didn’t have any this year!!

Recipes

Fried Green Tomatoes with Cilantro Avocado Sauce

Thai Crunch Salad with Peanut Dressing

Roasted Beet, Cauliflower and Farro Salad

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess…) Broccoli, Napa Cabbage, Carrots, Turnips, Braising Mix, Potatoes, Onions, Parsley, Fennel, Kohlrabi!