Still taking orders for 2026! Sign-up online or send in payment through Zelle, PayPal or check. For those who have wads of cash laying around you can also use that to pay for next season’s share. We’re not picky.
We still have honey for sale. Buy it in the tent or online. We can send it in your delivery box.
We still plan to run until the end of October. Please plan accordingly.
What will we have this week?
Sweet potatoes! See more about the sweet potatoes in the Farm News section. Onions. This week we are giving out storage onions. If you aren’t familiar with the different types of onions check out this old newsletter from last season. Peppers, potatoes (fingerling and red Viking), garlic, lemongrass, BS (though I give out a lot of BS over the course of the season, this week’s BS comes in the form of Brussels sprouts), winter squash and maybe some other things we find laying around the farm.
This is an Egg, Fruit and Cheese week. Fruit this week is pomegranates, grapes, apples, bosc pears, Asian pears, and cranberries. The apples are Haralson apples from a small, organic orchard just up the street from us in Afton called The Elm Tree Farm. These apples aren’t quite as pretty as the other apples we’ve had but they are a delicious, older variety of apple from the University of Minnesota. They were first bred more than 100 years ago and contrary to what some of this season’s workers think, this was before I was born! Also, if you don’t know how to eat pomegranates I would highly recommend using Google or your favorite search engine to learn how. Me trying to explain it just wouldn’t be prudent.
Farm News
One thing we try to grow every year is sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are not an easy crop to grow here in Minnesota since they like hot weather for a long time. Over the years we’ve had varying success growing them. Once we starting using black plastic our success rate went up significantly. But then the deer discovered the fabulous taste of sweet potato leaves and our success rate plummeted. Who knew that plants without leave wouldn’t produce any roots? Now that the deer have found a taste they enjoy they keep coming back year after year to partake in our sweet sweet potato vines.
This season as those who read the newsletter know, we put up a “deer” fence. I put deer in quotes since it doesn’t seem to keep the deer out. It mostly just deters the deer a bit. I estimate it cut our deer problem about in half. Last season I felt they consumed about 30% of our crop and 100% of certain crops like green beans and sweet potatoes. This year I estimate they ate about half our green beans and sweet potatoes so, success?
As you can imagine, if the deer eat half the green bean plants you would expect to harvest about half as many beans and I think that is pretty accurate estimate of what happened this year. But if the deer eat half the sweet potato vines you don’t get half as many sweet potatoes. You actually get far less than half as many and those you do get tend to be much smaller than usual. There just isn’t enough leaf surface to feed the energy needed to grow the roots. All this is to say that though we did far better than last year — infinitely better going from zero to more than zero — the results are still smaller and fewer sweet potatoes than we’d like. And the main reason I want to mention all this is that a lot of people eat sweet potatoes by cooking them, then scooping out the flesh from the peel and discarding the peel. I wouldn’t suggest that with these potatoes. Instead, plan on eating the whole sweet potato including the peel– it is delicious. You can do this by cutting them up and roasting them. Trying to scoop out the flesh would leave you with little sweet potato to enjoy.
What else? Oh, I never understand how the really large Brussels sprouts are grown. This season our plants got as tall as 4 feet tall. Pretty big plants if you ask me. Yet the sprouts are still smaller than you would find in stores. I have to believe there is some secret Brussels sprout cabal that hoards the seeds of the type of BS that grows big sprouts. The nice thing about smaller sprouts though is that you don’t have to cut them in half. Simply wash them, peel any bad leaves off the sprouts then cook them however you like. Easy-peasy!
What else? Hmm. I think this may be the latest we’ve ever picked peppers! We had a couple of frosts that could have killed them but the first one we put the sprinklers on them to protect them and the second frost we weren’t aware we were going to have one yet the peppers survived! They are quite the little troopers! I hope you are enjoying all the peppers!
That’s probably enough for now. As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, jokes, share orders or anything else you think would be helpful.
Joke of the Week
Why do sweet potatoes hate math? Too many square roots.