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CSA Week 14

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This Week’s Harvest

These are some of the nicest second crop tomatoes we’ve ever grown! Enjoy!

Farm News

We are transitioning into fall work which includes a lot of field clean up of old fields we are done with. We have to mow old corn stalks down, other vegetables we are done harvesting and weeds before they go to seed. We need to disc the fields and prepare them for cover crops. Of course it needs to rain to germinate the cover crop seed so we will wait for some actual forecasted rain before we spread the seeds. It’s been a trend over the last few years that it doesn’t rain in September! This makes establishing cover crop difficult! But we are still in the field prepping stage anyway, so perhaps by the time we are ready to seed, some rain will come our way!

I mentioned in last week’s blog that we had to water the carrots to be able to harvest them. The same is true for our potatoes. Fortunately we have learned our lesson that you shouldn’t harvest potatoes in dry conditions (the dry dirt clumps scuff up the potatoes and cause too much damage). So we moved our carrot water line over to the potato field and will water for about 3 hours a couple days ahead of digging (if we apply too much water, the tractor loses traction and we can’t run the digger!) We have dug 9 of our 14 beds of potatoes so far and hope to finish up that harvest this month.  We’ll have plenty of potatoes for the final third of the CSA season and for the extended season as well. 

Speaking of which, this is about the time we are able to assess if we can have an extended season with deliveries in November and December. We need to make sure our storage crops and fall plantings are looking good to have enough variety for the extended season. We got the fall carrots weeded, a couple rounds of spinach seeded, and the fall brassica field is established and looking healthy and weed free.  Once potatoes are all harvested we’ll move onto sweet potatoes but from above the ground I can tell the sweets will be just fine for the final weeks of regular CSA and the extended season. I’ll send more info about the extended season in October!

From here on out several veggies for the boxes will come from the brassica field. We started with the Collards and broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage will follow and we keep seeding – arugula, mustard, turnips, radishes- till the field is full of these cool weather loving Cole crops
Fall harvest has begun with winter squash. This week and last featured Delicata squash and the next 2 weeks will feature these Honeynuts. Later this week we will harvest our final winter squash variety, the reliable butternut.

Recipes

Chinese Scrambled Eggs with Tomato

Swiss Chard and Potato Soup (use fresh tomatoes instead of canned)

Delicata Squash Salad

Grilled Summer Vegetables with Tahini Dipping Sauce

Coming Up Next Week (our best guess..) Beets, Carrots, Sweet Onions, Honeynut Squash, Japanese Eggplant, Escarole, Potatoes, Swiss Chard, Tomatoes, Peppers

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