1st Week of the Fall CSA Season: Week of October 30th

head lettuce in the tunnels, photo by Ryan

This Week’s Availability

This week we will have:

• Greens: baby lettuce, spinach, arugula, green curly kale, lacinato kale bunches, bok choi, red head lettuce, green cabbage, Napa cabbage, pea shoots, and brussels sprouts

• Roots: carrots, yellow potatoes, rutabaga, red beets, yellow beets, chioggia beets, watermelon radish, daikon radish, and parsnips

• Alliums: onions, garlic, shallots, and leeks

• Fruiting Crops: sweet green Italian Carmen peppers, poblano peppers, jalapeno peppers, aji rico hot peppers, delicata squash, and butternut squash

• Herbs and Miscellaneous: parsley, fennel, Painted Mountain corn

it’s not summer anymore, photo by Kara

Farm News

Thanks for signing up for the Fall CSA Season! If you are brand new, and have any questions about how it works that aren’t answered in the weekly email or on the website, please feel free to reach out.

Reminder that during the Fall CSA Season, the barn is only set up for veggie pickup on Wednesdays and Thursdays. (Tuesdays are just for the Summer CSA Season.)

Last week we dug, harvested, sorted, washed, bagged, and stored the last of the storage carrots. That’s always a big project, but it was nice to use the warm, sunny days to get them out. It’s much more common to be freezing our fingers off in cold, damp soil in the fall, so that was a nice gift. We had to super row cover several crops for this Sunday’s projected overnight low in the teens. We can still harvest many of out outdoor crops after they get frozen, but only to the upper 20s unless they are really well tucked in for some protection. This week we will plant onion sets to harvest early onions in the spring, and then we will start tackling garlic planting.

Ryan has been doing more volunteering with our local school’s garden program, and this week he got to work with the Kindergarten/First Grade class to prepare dried beans and grain corn seeds for planting next spring. The kids got to use a simple hand crank machine to remove the kernels from the cob, and they got to stomp on the dried beans and winnow them with a small shop vac to get the dried beans. The kids were especially excited to bring the beans home. It’s a real treat to get to share our excitement for regionally produced food with kids. It feels like part of the important work of building a resilient food shed includes developing the next generation’s fluency with gardening, eating, stewarding land, and knowing what to do with what grows well here.

Have a great week!

-ESF Team: Ryan, Kara, K2, Cindy, Galen, Katie, Taylor, Vanessa, Bryan, Leah, and Natalie (and Sky and Soraya)

Usually we put a weekly recipe here…but the first week of the season I like pointing out that all the recipes that we post are archived on the recipe page of the website. You can search by vegetable, season, or ingredient. Only 30 recipes are listed under each season, but if you use the search function with a vegetable, way more recipes show up with that vegetable.

Vane washing chard… who doesn’t love starting the day by knocking ice out of the wash tubs to wash greens?! photo by Kara

K2 laughing at my jokes about how fun it is to work here on a frosty morning getting sprayed by the barrel washer, photo by Kara

if there’s still a smile, is it that bad?! photo by Kara

due to the dual factors that (1) I live with a 6-year old and (2) that even though I know we have plenty of other baby lettuce to harvest that is safely under row cover, I still get sad to see the inevitable frosting and passing by of otherwise edible crops, when I snapped this pic of frozen lettuce all I could hear in my head was, “Let it go! Let it goooooooo!” photo (and uncanny ability to find Disney princess references in the fields) by Kara

Cindy and Bryan finished emptying the prop house…now to put do the drainage and cover work to put it all back in, photo by Kara

Next month’s cilantro, photo by Ryan

still harvesting leeks from the field, photo by Ryan

tunnel spinach, photo by Ryan

baby kale in the tunnel, photo by Ryan

last carrot field right before we finished the last bed. Then this got prepared for garlic planting, photo by Ryan

Ryan and Bryan prepping a field for onion sets, photo by Kara

This is a cool picture because the light green in the foreground shows the cover crop field they ate through last week, a mixture of oats, and daikon radish. Midweek, I moved their pasture to the next section of that field, same mix of cover crops, just getting to start with a new fresh area. It makes it neat to see how low they mow down a robust cover crop from a week and a half of munching. This cover crop will still do what we want for the soil over the winter, and we get the added benefit of the fertility from the goat manure, photo by Kara

tunnel baby lettuce with an arugula weed, photo by Ryan

K2 and Leah rocking carrot washing, photo by Kara

same deal here…. frosted hot pepper plants done for  the season… well, just done for the marketing season: the quality of a pepper frosted on a plant isn’t good to sell or distribute, but because I am scrappy, i collect all the ripe ones from the plant, roast them, and turn them into hot sauce for our winter needs. I have been told that sometime I should do a newsletter on all the scrappy farm to table hacks I do for our family, stay tuned for that, photo by Kara

early morning frostiness is a bit more palatable this time of year with the waning gorgeous warm colors of the hillside, photo by Kara

tunnel greens, photo by Ryan

broccolini gone to seed, photo by Ryan

tunnel kale, photo by Adam Ford

Cindy harvesting storage carrots, photo by Ryan

gorgeous field of cover crops that will provide nice soil stability for the winter, and soil nutrients for the spring, photo by Ryan

Bella and Noel enjoying two cover crop fields last week, photo by Ryan

Noel and Bella in their new stand of cover crops. The fence separates the two pastures within the same cover crop, and shows how efficient they are grazing it. In the early years at this location we used pigs to open up many of the new fields. They rooted up the soil and especially did a great job of eating the tender (and troublesome) shoots of bindweed. Then we’d plant it to a cover crop and have our milking goats graze it. We don’t keep pigs anymore, partly because they are more soil disturbance than we want, photo by Kara

beautiful heads in the tunnel, likely for a December harvest, photo by Ryan