Not much time to write today. Too much to do…
Garlic Planting Party is set for Saturday, October 8th from 2:00 to 5:00 with bonfire and potluck to follow. Come out and enjoy the great company, get some exercise and learn a bit more about where your food comes from. All ages welcome. Please let me know if you plan to attend.
Last call for spot prawns! These are delicious and perfect for that post Thanksgiving dinner. Order from our online store or send me an email. Dungeness crab deadline is the middle of October so don’t delay.
We’ll start taking orders for next season sometime in October — or as soon as I setup the online store.
This week’s apology is for the winter squash. We started harvesting the winter squash last week and finished the project this afternoon. It wasn’t pretty. About half the squash we picked up were rotten. Then when we brought in what we expected to be good squash we found about a third of them to have problems. Typically we grow a couple thousand squash each year. This year we have maybe 500 — 300 of which went out last week. Suffice it to say we won’t have a lot of winter squash this season. Why the rot problem? Well, as mentioned many times this season, the frequent wet weather creates an ideal environment for diseases to grow. Some plants don’t have a lot of disease pressure (eggplant comes to mind) so they do well with a lot of rain. Other like tomatoes and squash just don’t stand up well to the many diseases that attack them. So their productivity diminishes dramatically.
I’m not sure what we will do for WinterStorageShare. We obviously do not have enough winter squash. We have plenty of onions, shallots and garlic (and eggplant 😉 so if anyone wants to swap for these we can certainly accommodate. We will most likely have plenty of potatoes but won’t know until we get around to digging them (hopefully the rain isn’t causing problems here as well). And unfortunately as I write this more rain is coming down…
On a positive side the peppers keep on going! The warm fall temps have allowed the peppers to survive longer than usual. So if you like peppers (and eggplants) this is the season!
What will we have this week? New this week (hopefully, we haven’t waded through them very far yet) are watermelon radishes and daikon radishes. We’ve grown diakons before but never watermelon radishes. One of our members asked us to grow them so we did (see how easy that is!) To me they tasted like regular radishes but with a beautiful red interior surrounded by a layer of white — kind of like watermelons. The tops of the plants look great. We hope the bottoms are great as well. Besides the radishes we will have leeks, garlic, onions, peppers (until frost), eggplant (it won’t stop!), beans, some carrots, some squash (hopefully), potatoes (a beautiful variety called Desiree) and possibly other things I’m not recalling. Oh and kohlrabi!
Fruit, cheese, bread, flowers and eggs all come this week.
As always, feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions, requests, etc.