This Week’s Harvest
- Spinach
- Napa Cabbage
- Purple Daikon Radish
- Purple Top Turnips
- Red Potatoes
- Garlic
- Carrots
- Arugula
- Tomato
- Brussels Sprouts
Farm News
This week marks the end of our regular CSA season. We wanted to thank everyone for your support and hope you and your loved ones enjoyed the produce! If you want to get more vegetables into December- please read last week’s blog for a preview of our extended season and stay tuned to your inboxes for further info and sign up instructions!
I usually do a year in review for the final CSA post. CSA is such a great model for vegetable farmers because of the guaranteed support we get from our members. Every year is different and presents its own successes and tribulations. Of course we hate dissapointing our members with crop failures, and I promise you we try our best every year. Unfortunately this was a tough year for legumes and I’d say the biggest disappointment of the year was the lack of green beans. We only got one super weedy planting in that gave us green beans and dragon tongue beans for a couple weeks. The next bean planting was slated to be even bigger with edamame beans thrown into the mix. Unfortunately it rained 5 inches right after seeding and our seeds rotted. And then we just didn’t have another window for another seeding until it was too late.
We did feel like we had successful carrots this year! Summer in Ohio does not provide ideal conditions for this finicky crop, but thanks to choosing a good variety, Bolero, we did have good summer carrots this year. And our summer plantings of melons, corn, squash, peppers, and tomatoes continue to do well for us. Spring is tough for some members of the brassica family (namely broccoli, radishes, and cauliflower) so we don’t plant a lot in spring but rather focus on them for fall. However fall is starting to give us trouble like spring. We need to tweak our fall brassica planting dates a little to help us get back to reliable broccoli and cauliflower! And, like the carrots, find good varieties to grow for our climate.
Today we will not only pack out and deliver our final Tuesday CSA share, we will also plant our garlic. I bring this up so I can end on a positive of the year- our garlic! Those of you who were part of the CSA last year know we did not have any garlic. We had to buy in organic garlic seed to plant and start rebuilding our seed stock. The planting did well and not only did we we have enough garlic for several CSA share distributions and market, but we were able to save 150 lbs of the biggest cloves for planting 2022 crop. (By the way, we still have plenty for our extended season boxes too!)
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