Breaking News: We have recently uncovered new evidence that we feel contradicts our analysis outlined in a previous newsletter, specifically The Potato Head Controversy where we discussed the genders and reproduction methods of various vegetables. I will reveal this new evidence shortly, but first we have a few important issues to tie up.
The season is over. If you come out to the farm this week we will assume you are volunteering and we will put you to work! I’m sure our drop sites have similar policies.
If you enjoyed this season why not rejoin us for next season as well? We are taking orders and have quite a few people already signed up, Thank you! If you join now you can lock in this year’s price for next season’s produce. All we need is $100 deposit. New members can order through our online store.
We have a “neighbor” (I put neighbor in quotes because he isn’t exactly our neighbor but lives nearby) in Afton who has organic eggs for sale. If you are looking for local organic eggs this winter feel free to contact him directly at jseifert@usgo.net.
Farm News
From a farming perspective this season was one for the record books. Records broken this year include, but are not limited to: latest Spring frost (May 29th), latest Fall frost (October 17th), least amount of rain in June (0″), least amount of rain in July (0″), most amount of rain in August (18″), and most eggplants harvested on October 15th (>200#). It was a challenging year to say the least.
On a related note, why was the farm so busy this past week that I was unable to write a decent newsletter? Great question. And here is the mediocre but long answer. Typically when we are nearing the middle to end of September we will see a forecast for frost. When this occurs we scramble to harvest any crops that will perish from the cold. We’ll harvest all the tomatoes even if they are not yet ripe. Same with the peppers. We’ll harvest the eggplants no matter their size. We’ll harvest all the hot peppers left on the plants. As you can imagine this level of harvest is heavier than a typical weekly harvest during the peak of the season. This year the scramble didn’t take place until the week prior to last week when there were rumblings in the weather business that the upcoming Friday would be “the coldest of the year”. I guess they don’t include January, February, March, April and May in this forecast.
Also this time of year, specifically the end of the season, we scramble to harvest everything that is left in the field. Why leave it for the deer to eat? Haven’t they had enough already? In a typical year this isn’t as much of a scramble since we would have been harvesting most of it prior to the end. For example, the BS isn’t harvested until a frost but this year we didn’t have a frost so we hadn’t harvested it yet. This season, with the warm fall, we had still been harvesting the warm season crops and leaving many of the cool season crops to continue to grow. So much like the cargo ships trying to get into the US ports, our cool season crops were backed-up. The end of season harvest was far larger than normal and the first frost harvest was far later than normal resulting in both of these large events taking place simultaneously. Yikes!
As I mentioned above, we harvested over 200 pounds of eggplants. I doubt we harvested 200 pounds anytime prior this season but here we did it in October! We harvested over 130 pounds of hot peppers and more than 800 peppers — mostly green. Also, several of these plant varieties are time consuming to harvest, specifically root veggies like potatoes, sweet potatoes and carrots. Due to their time consuming nature during the season we try to only harvest one of these root veggies in a given week. We harvested both potatoes and carrots this past week — ugh. The sweet potatoes were harvested but not washed the week before so they could cure. Additionally, root veggies are far more time consuming to clean. So having all three to not only harvest but to wash left no time for writing newsletters.
Suffice it to say that we did about 3.5 weeks of work in about 1.5 weeks of time. It was quite the challenge but we got ‘er done.
What will we have this week?
Nothing. No veggies, no flowers, no coffee, no fruit, no eggs, and no ‘shrooms.
Finally, let’s loop back to the beginning of this newsletter where I mentioned the new evidence brought to light earlier this month that has caused us to rethink our position stated in the Potato Head Controversy article. To paraphrase our position for those who choose not to reread it, we argued that it wasn’t controversial that Hasbro dropped the “Mr.” from its potato head line of products but that it was way past due. Potatoes, we believed at the time of the article’s writing, are reproduced asexually and have no gender. Well, below you will see this new evidence we dug up that we believe proves this is not the case at all and that at the very least there exists Mr. Potato Heads in the natural world. I feel the evidence in incontrovertible. We stand corrected.
As always, feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions, theories and other interesting tidbits of information. And thank you for a wonderful season!