Maybe it’s just me but doesn’t country music sound better when driving a tractor? I suppose for the non-tractor owners it is like listening to country music while driving a pick-up truck on a gravel road with your arm hanging out the window and the wind ruffling your hair under your cowboy hat as you squint into the sunrise on your way to purchase feed at the feed store. This should give you city folk something you can relate to.
One quick announcement: Blah, blah, blah GAGG. See one of the last few newsletters.
This Week’s Challenges
In last week’s newsletter I asked which is worse, a forecast of frost with no frost or frost. This past week I found the answer, “None of the above”. The correct answer is frost with no forecast of frost. Yes last week we had a frost. I guess I shouldn’t complain about the forecast. The National Weather Service did issue a frost advisory. It was issued at 4:07 am the night of the frost. Why I wasn’t tuned into the NWS forecast at 4:07 am is my fault. This time of year I should be tuned in day and night to the NWS forecast Sleep is overrated. But I let my guard down since every TV station forecast said, “No frost for the Twin Cities area”. Why do I trust my livelihood to something with so poor success? I guess again it must be me. I run the farm on tractors older than most of my members. But they seem to be far more reliable than all the weather forecasters, who I might add are also younger than my tractors. It must suck to be less reliable at your job than a 1949 Allis Chalmers model G tractor.
On a more positive note, last week into this week is the event we work toward all season long. To recap: In the spring we start out pretty light with some lettuce lifts and kale curls. In summer we move on to more strenuous activities like cucumber crunches and potato pull-ups. All these activities are to get us ready for the main event — squash thrusts. Yes, this past week and into this week and perhaps into next week as well we are harvesting the winter squash and pumpkins. What makes winter squash harvesting so much work is that unlike other veggies we harvest, winter squash is all harvested pretty much all at once. With cukes we harvest a couple hundred every day or two, so maybe two or three bins worth of cukes. With winter squash we harvest as many bins worth as we have bins, move them to the greenhouse to cure, then go out and do it again until we run out of time or squash, whichever comes first. Running out of energy is not an option. So far we’ve been time constrained.
This season’s squash harvest is so far going quite nicely. The weather is warm and dry — two great weather attributes when squash harvesting. For many of the past seasons the squash harvest happened as a cold front moved in, which as we all know brings rain and cold weather. I guess this prepared us for washing potatoes in the snow. But I prefer this season’s weather. Everyone is much happier — including the squash.
Speaking of this season, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the weather this year has been strange. And to prove it, here is a picture of our lilacs blooming. Has anyone ever seen lilacs bloom in the fall?
What will we have this week?
Well we’ll have some more winter squash. This week’s featured squash is carnival. They are smallish, very colorful squash with tasty, flaky flesh. We will also have lots more beans. What? Aren’t beans frost sensitive? Yes they are, but the frost we got only killed the top leaves of the bean plants. The beans underneath the canopy survived, so more beans! We’ll also have more garlic, onions (the onions we send out from this point forward will be storage onions; very potent when raw but very delicious when cooked), some broccoli, some Napa cabbage, some beets, some tomatoes, some tomatillos, some peppers, and some other odds and ends.
FlowerShare this week will be ornamental gourds. Most of the other flowers have succumbed to the frost, disease, old age or insect pests — or perhaps all four. No other shares this week.