Cool…

Three weeks to go (including this one).

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We are planning on planting garlic on Saturday, October 14th from 1:00 until we are done. The forecasters are predicting rain on Friday so it might not happen but then again when are they ever right? So put it on your calendar but also pencil in alternative plans just in case!

We’ll keep taking back the pint size cherry tomato containers even though we might never harvest cherry tomatoes again (this year).

For those of you on-farm pick-uppers who are concerned about me not being around so much please quit worrying. It’s not good for your health! And the reason I am gone at the beginning of the pick-up time is that I am now doing the deliveries to the drop sites. So, if you want to see me, go to one of our drop sites and hang around until I show up. Or you can plan to arrive closer to 5:30. And if you hope to never see me again, 4:00 is your ideal pick-up time! (Wait a minute. Is this just a ruse to find out who really cares?)

Farm News

So last week while I was driving around and listening to the radio (for you younguns, that is the thing in the middle of the dash where you adjust the volume when you are listening to your phone through your car speakers) when Sven Sundgaard was talking about the weather (huh. Sven talking about weather? How odd.) and he suddenly uttered the f-word. Yes, the f-word. I thought for sure I would have heard it earlier, like back in September but this year — as well as the last few years — we hadn’t heard it until October. And of course the f-word I’m talking about is frost.

Yes, we got frost Sunday night. Or was it Monday morning? No matter. It affects the farm whether it is at night or in the morning. It kills or at least harms the frost sensitive plants. I think that is why they call them frost sensitive. Typically — except as I mentioned above for the last few years — we would get a frost in mid-September. I like years like this one better where we can slowly transition from warm summer crops to cool fall crops over the course of a month. With September frosts it seems the warm season crops are still going when they are killed by frost. In October, their growth is significantly slowed — I suspect due to the lack of sunlight and hot weather — so losing them now isn’t as traumatic.

Full disclosure: We did have a very slight frost a few weeks ago. I was feeding the horses early one morning and looked down and saw what looked like frost on the ground in a shady spot. I reached down to confirm and it was in fact frost. It wasn’t widespread and I suppose if I was a weather person I would have to say it was “patchy frost” since it was only this small patch. But I suspect that it was a bit more patchy than I saw since I noticed some of our hot pepper plants started losing their leaves a short few days later. That is the thing about frost. It has a mind of its own.

So what does frost mean for the farm? With a frost this late into the season we don’t try to save any of the frost sensitive plants by using sprinklers or row covers. There isn’t much time left in the season so the likelihood of them producing any more than they have today is minimal. Instead we harvest anything on the plant that is worth harvesting. So this week we’ll give out a bunch of veggies that may be on the small, green side — then they will be gone for the rest of the season.

What will we have this week?

Lemongrass! Yes we grow lemongrass and this year it looks pretty good. So fire up your curry making cookbooks and find a good recipe using lemongrass! We’ll also have some leeks. They didn’t grow as well as in past years. Part of the reason is the variety we used to grow — Megaton — is no longer available. So this variety seems more kiloton or maybe just ton or in a lot of cases pound. Anyway, that’s farming for ya. We’ll also have the last of the cherry and regular tomatoes. We picked a bunch of them green. I’m not sure if they will ripen but you can certainly make fried green tomatoes out of them. We also have small eggplants, many small and a few bigger peppers, more arugula, more mesclun, some garlic, some onions, a few tomatillos, lots of hot peppers (on-farm pick-uppers feel free to grab as many as you want, drop-siters let me know if you want some and how many), daikon radishes (anyone figure out what to do with these other than salad?), winter squash, a few more pie pumpkins, and of course the usual things I don’t recall.

It is a ‘ShroomShare week and the last of the CoffeeShare. We’ll try to get the rest of the gourds washed for FlowerShare next week.

Joke of the Week

It is hard to find jokes about lemongrasss but I found one!

My daughter asked me why there are a lot of soaps that smell like lavender. I said “It’s just a popular smell that a lot of people like, like sweet orange, lemongrass and rosemary.” She paused and then nodded and replied: “Yes, that’s common scents.”

As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions, 2024 share orders or other interesting bit of information!

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