by milecreekfarm

CSA- Extended Week 3

This Week’s Harvest

All of these vegetables, minus cilantro, should last awhile! Sweet potatoes and Butternut and garlic want to be out on the counter. Everything else should be wrapped in plastic or kept in a container in the fridge. This helps them retain their moisture and stay crunchy!

Pictures From the Week

Fresh field cilantro
Purple Kohlrabi runs through the washer
700 lbs of Carrots washed and ready for bagging
Lots of time spent in the packshed this time of year washing our storage crops

Farm News and Yearly Wrap Up

Happy Holiday season everyone! 

Once the first plants “hit the ground” in early April, we don’t stop “running”. That means we’ve put in at least 60 hours of work a week for 37 weeks. Needless to say, we are really looking forward to some down time with family! Which starts after this week’s CSA deliveries. Along those lines, we won’t have any sign up information for our 2023 CSA season until after the New Year. And as always, our current members will have first dibs at securing their spot, so stay tuned for sign up news.

As far as this year goes, the work we put in paid off and we feed over 300 households through our CSA, hundreds of market customers, school children in Cincinnati, and, through our donations to Access to Excess, food insecure residents in the Miami Valley. We tried new crop management techniques, new equipment, and new varieties of crops. We had an amazing crew of a combination of returning and new employees, full and part time. We appreciate Charity’s ability to do everything super quickly and somehow neatly at the same time, Anna’s eye for quality control and detail, Nate’s tractor know how and willingness to get tasks done, Audrey’s passion towards and knowledge of every aspect of the operation including bird whispering, Ian’s delivery expertise (I had to do yesterday’s delivery and was at least an hour slower!), Jewell’s ability to learn quickly and go with the flow, and Jake, Nic and Nilofer for jumping in late in the season to help us finish out the year strong.

Anna, Charity and Jewell try out the new transplanter
Audrey rescues a hummingbird from the greenhouse
Audrey and Charity plant peppers while Nate drives as straight as possible
Nate hills the potatoes
Charity, Audrey and Anna harvest summer squash
Audrey and Nate pack corn for a wholesale order
Nate and Audrey bring in the Butternut Squash
Audrey and Charity pick carrots in the muck
all hands on deck for our fall storage crop harvest, including these carrots

And our adorable cat Cheddar’s job was to entertain us, which he did a fine job of doing.

Cheddar on Things
Winter Squash patch stayed pretty weed free because we installed landscape fabric between rows. We’ll do this approach next year as well.
Audrey, Nate and Nilofer harvest the spaghetti squash before we got 3 inches of rain. Having clean dry squash is important for storage and unfortunately the spaghettis were the only ones we had time to get before the rain. The acorn squash suffered from the large amount of rain (think ripe squash sitting in puddles), the honeynuts did ok, and the butternuts seemed unfazed (which is why we grow a lot of them!!)
Sunrise pick of salad mix. This crop remains a season long staple for us
We got a new to use transplanter that allows us to plant faster. We have to fix it a little bit as the plants wouldn’t always come out the shoot correctly for perfect planting
Try not to be too sad we have to wait months for these flavors!

We’d love to hear feedback from our customers, so drop a comment if there is something you want us to know about your CSA experience! Thanks for your support!

Recipes

Spicy Thai Kohlrabi Salad

Turnip Fritters

News Year’s Black Eyed Peas and Cabbage (use Napa and regular cabbage)