by milecreekfarm

CSA Week 21

Announcement

CSA MEMBER POTLUCK: Sunday Nov 7th 4 to 7 (weather dependent). Join us for an end of season celebration! We’ll tour the farm and eat delicious food prepared by all of us! More details sent via email.

This Week’s Harvest

Farm News

During the summer months all time spent not harvesting for CSA is spent either planting or tending to crops. This time of year planting has long concluded (with the exception of garlic) and the plants are pretty much riding it out -no more need to weed, no tomatoes to trellis. With this easing of the work load, we decided a few years back to focus on fall production and crops that can be harvested all at once and stored for several months. So nowadays all time spent after CSA harvest is spent doing our bulk harvest. I’ve mentioned we’ve harvested all the potatoes and sweet potatoes already. We are currently working on turnips and daikon radishes. We’ll finish out with beets and carrots. Ideally we’d be done watering for the year but without any measurable rain since September 5th we are still watering. We needed to water the turnips, carrots, radishes to help them size up, We needed to water sweet potatoes just so that we could harvest them. Certain crops are totally out of luck- we have 2 beds of head lettuce and salad mix that are in a field all on their own and we can’t justify watering them when other things need the water too. And another set of these crops in another field by themselves. We map out the fields to avoid this situation which works when everything is growing but this time of year when the amount crops actively growing isn’t as large its not possible to have everything all together. On top of having to water its been so windy that the water runs are pretty terrible with the wind blowing the water from the west half of the run to east half so only 7 beds are getting well watered, not 14. Rain is in the forecast tonight and we hope it comes to fruition! Despite my complaining though, things are looking good and, as I’ve mentioned before, we plant a lot to ensure that all of our CSA boxes are full so when the parsley looks terrible because it is too dry, we can count on a different crop to take its place in the CSA box.

White Daikon radish harvest
Scarlet turnip harvest
Watering sweet potatoes just so we can harvest them!
With nothing else growing anymore in this field, these lettuce and herb beds are completely reliant on rain. Our final stand of sweetcorn was to the left so we were watering this field when we had corn.
We did plant garlic last week, a task we normally have to squeeze in between fall rains that we able to do on our time frame when we had time.

Recipes

Winter Slaw (great topping for tacos or pulled pork sandwiches)

Roasted Sweet potatoes and wilted Spinach (the spinach in the share is not baby spinach so should be sautéed with 1/2 the butter to soften fully)

Potato and Greens Frittata (use yellow potatoes in place of red and use the spinach or braising greens as your green)

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess….) Mustard Greens, Golden Beets, Potatoes, Onions, Garlic, Carrots, Butternut Squash, Napa Cabbage, Cilantro