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CSA Week 11

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This Week’s Harvest

Farm News

Something about this season that I’ve been dreading to disclose is that we had garlic crop failure! I was hoping we’d have enough good garlic bulbs for 2 weeks of CSA at the very least but we only had enough for one! This is sad because, as many of you are aware, our garlic is really tasty! A disease came through and wiped it out. We aren’t sure but we think it was asters yellow. We noticed premature yellowing and dying back of the plants a few weeks before our target harvest date. Asters yellow affects more then just the flower and gets its name form the aster leafhopper that spreads it. If there is an unchecked leaf hopper population it will spread the pathogen like wildfire. While we couldn’t do anything to save our garlic crop, we were able to protect our onions growing nearby. I went through the patch and hand pulled out affected plants- ones that were starting to show the same yellowing as the garlic. This action of removing diseased plants from the field made it so there was no bacteria for leaf hoppers to spread.

So while it is a major bummer that we do not have garlic this season, I can fortunately report that the onion crop did amazing and we will be able to fill your CSA boxes with these alliums instead. We are also already ordering our garlic seed to start fresh for next season!

This garlic may look ok to the untrained eye, but the yellowing and lack of roots means it’s either already rotten or won’t last and will be rotten soon
At the same time we were learning our garlic crop was a complete loss, we closely monitored the onion field which was just a field over from the garlic beds.
At first it looked good but about 10 days later we noticed a few scattered plants with the same stunted yellowing. I went through and pulled out all the affected plants which was about a kitchen trash bags worth.
Onions in from the field and drying out. Now they are all dried down and in our storage cooler for long term storage. We should have plenty for the rest of the regular season and for the extended season!

Recipes

Roasted Shishito Peppers with Peanut and Lemon Basil Dipping Sauces

Zucchini Raita (a CSA customer shared this delicious looking recipe with me! A unique way to use zucchini for sure!) If the link to instagram doesn’t work the account to look up for the recipe reel is indisch.windisch

Pesto Potatoes

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess…) Dragon Tongue beans, potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, sweet peppers, salad mix, dill, collard greens, sweet corn, cantaloupe, red onions

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