Looks like we’re getting close to harvesting our AmphibianShare! That and more following these brief messages.
We’ll gladly take back and reuse any of the pint clam shells. Bring them with you for on-farm pick-up or leave them in your tote for drop site pick-up. Thank you!
Garlic Planting is scheduled for Saturday October 2nd starting at 1:00 and going until it is all planted. If the weather isn’t conducive to planting that day we will reschedule to the following weekend. This is a great opportunity to see the farm and meet fellow farm members. Let me know if you can make it! All ages welcome.
Farm News
First the big news. As I was driving last night around dusk on 60th street between Oakgreen and Neal I saw a black bear scamper down the road a few yards in front of me. I’m not sure how this impacts you or the farm but I thought it was pretty startling and worthy of a mention. I’ve never seen a bear out this way before though I have heard from many others that they are around occasionally. So while coming out to the farm if you see a something that looks like a bear it may actually be a bear.
We have some good news bad news on the eggplant situation. The good news is there are lots of eggplant flowers which hopefully will turn into eggplants soon. The bad news is there are lots of eggplant flowers that could regrettably turn into eggplants soon. It is all in your perspective. Either way, this time of year we have to keep our eyes and ears on the weather listening and looking for the f-word. The five letter f-word. I’m not even going to write it, and hopefully it is a long way off but we have seen f as early as late August and as late as early October. Typically it seems to occur here in mid to late September. I’m hoping for a late f so we have more eggplant.
As we head into the fall part of our season a couple things start to change. First, and we’ve already see this, the veggies get heavier (though this week we started back harvesting the kale!) Second, some of the cool season crops reemerge. One of course is the already mentioned kale. We allow the kale plants to grow all season but seldom harvest it during the heat of the summer for two reason: 1 – flea beetles tend to damage the leaves and make them look unappealing, and 2 – there is a lot of other things that need to be harvested. But now the flea beetles are fewer and the leaves are looking more appetizing so back to kale harvest!
Other cool season crops you will start to see again are kohlrabi, Napa cabbage (though we don’t typically grow this in the spring), broccoli, Swiss chard and cauliflower. Carrots are also technically a cool season crop and they do taste far better when maturing during cool weather or after a frost but we harvest them whenever they get to be the right size. We also planted a lettuce salad mix — a cool season crop — and hope to still get in a mesclun salad mix that contains more “spicy” greens this fall.
The third thing about the fall season is there are more large scale harvests and fewer daily harvests. Some examples are onions, where we harvest and cure all the remaining onions for distribution over the course of the next few weeks. Winter squash, again we try to harvest it all at once so we can cure it all at once. Potatoes, which are no longer growing and are mostly dead so we can harvest as many of them whenever we have the opportunity and store them for distribution as needed. We also have pumpkins, both ornamental for FlowerShare and edible for the VeggieShares. These along with the winter squash are ready to harvest now and we’d be advised to do so since leaving them out in the field allows for more things to go wrong. But we have limited time and labor so again we will harvest these as time allows.
Brussels sprouts are another mass harvest item. They are time-consuming to not only harvest but also remove from the stalk. They are looking pretty good though this year! In addition, if we see a forecast of the f-word we’ll need to get the sweet potatoes harvested before the f hits. We’ve found in past seasons that if we get a f before we dig the sweet potatoes the roots don’t keep very well. Also with a f forecasted we’ll harvest all the hot peppers and possibly the sweet peppers depending on the length of the f and the depth of the temperature. We have ways to keep the plants alive if we have a one or two night f but won’t take extra steps if the f lasts for more than two nights.
Typically the edamame fits in to this mass harvest situation however this year with the amount the deer ate there isn’t a massive amount of edamame still out in the field. We should have some but not the level we planted. Why don’t the deer eat from the multiple hundreds of acres of soybeans the area farmers plant? No, they have to eat our minuscule one bed of soybeans. Very irritating.
Enough about the farm. What will we have this week?
Well, we will continue to give out as many tomatoes as we can harvest until the tomatoes slow down. I’m thinking we may be at peak tomato for this year and it should slow down shortly. This is doubly true for the cherries. I think cherry tomatoes peaked last week when we harvested somewhere around 400 pints. We’ll also have more carrots — the second of four planting this year. More potatoes, more peppers, some kale, some cabbage, some kohlrabi, some okra, a few cucumbers (they are rapidly slowing down) some chard, very few eggplants, some tomatillos, some onions, plenty of garlic and I suppose a few other odds and ends.
Only FlowerShare this week.
For those who still have okra or plan to get okra this week I highly recommend this recipe for bhindi masala recommended by a fellow member on our Facebook Forum. It has so many flavors you could use the recipe for any vegetable you don’t like!
That is all for now. Send in your questions, comments, suggestions, and jokes!