CSA Week 20

This Week’s Harvest

Broccoli OR Cauliflower
Napa Cabbage
Sweet Italian peppers OR Bell peppers
Beets
Carrots
Honeynut squash
Kale
Daikon Radish
Red Onions
Cilantro
Sweet Potatoes
Celery

Farm News

This week’s box concludes the regular CSA season. Thanks to everyone for joining us this season! This wraps up our 17th CSA season! We think we had another successful season of supplying customers with unique and great tasting vegetables. As far as I know we are the only certified organic sweet corn grown in all of Montgomery county Ohio. We sell it wholesale to a couple farmer friends for their farm stands but that is only after our CSA customers get it first. So we hope you not only liked it but realize what a treat it really is !

After our garlic crop failure, I was pleased the onions turned out as good as they did. We love growing the variety Expression, because it is both a sweet onion that not only tastes great raw or cooked, but can also be stored for the entire CSA duration. After the garlic, I think my second most disappointing aspect of the season was our final planting of green beans. I was looking forward to including another round or 2 of beans in October but the planting was decimated by cucumber beetles. Once our cucurbit crops – melons, cucumbers, winter squash and summer squash- were done, the cucumber beetles just moved onto other crops. Turns out the green beans seemed to be their new favorite, unbeknown to me, and when we went to pick there wasn’t a single bean free of multiple terrible bites.

Unfortunately a lot of our fall carrot seeding suffered rot from saturated fields after Hurricane Helene so that is another disappointment. We grow so many so we’ll still be able to harvest quite a few for the extended season. For the past few years we have saved enough of the carrots and kept them all the way until the first couple June boxes of the CSA! I am not sure we will be able to do that this season, but we will know soon enough after the bulk harvest is complete. Another positive is that they are the only crop that suffered from the 4 plus inches of rain. The beets and cilantro right next to them are totally fine.

unfortunately pockets of carrots in the planting look like this!

But not all! And we easily harvested our bunched carrots for the week especially after we got out of the low section of the field.

Another highlight for me for the season was our nearly 100% returning crew. We had one new addition, but she was the sister of 2 other employees so she knew what she was getting into! It’s really nice to have experience in the field since something as simple as making a bunch of cilantro actually takes training! And making them quickly takes skill! They are a hard working bunch and we appreciate them greatly.

Pictured here are about half of our employees. Jewell, Charity, Anna, Nic and Audrey have each worked here at least 3 seasons!

If you want more Mile Creek Farm veggies and don’t want to wait until next year, be sure to sign up for our extended season! We’ll distribute 2 boxes in November and 2 in December- I will be emailing out more info about the season and how to sign up at the end of the week including what veggies to expect- we have A LOT of gorgeous produce still!