Newsflash — If you don’t have time to read the whole newsletter, the big news is: PEPPER ROASTING is happening at the farm from 4-6pm tomorrow. Peppers (mostly sweet, but a few Pueblo chilies and other hots too) are available to purchase and our crew will help you roast. Someone from the team will be leading tours at 4.30 and 5.30. The farmstore is open all the time but we’ll have our regular farm store hosting hours from 3-6pm.
Well, it’s about time that you meet our awesome crew! Clockwise from the left: Mary, Sabrina, Jay, Tyler, Dylan, Abigail, and Hannah with Noah behind the lens. If you’ve noticed the farm looking sharp lately it is really due to the hard work of all these good folks—weeding, planting, harvesting, and turning over beds.
Every single Friday for the last five weeks at least, I’ve been busy shaping beds — not just seeding fall cover crop, but getting ready for our big farm winter transition. As our crew works on market harvests and bulk harvests of storage crops, some of us get the last winter transplants in the ground, prepping for the enormous 4th season to come. So, at the same time cover crop prepares to bloom, winter transplants are growing. On a Friday when our habit is to focus just on harvesting for market, it’s an odd shift of seasons, as we mature and grow as farmers. I call this the start of eating season, as we look forward to the longer nights and more slowly-simmered dinners (though of course dinners of goat cheese in a sweet pepper and salads loaded with ripe tomatoes have been lovely too). At night, our food dryer’s fan hums while our the hens chortle in their moveable barns, just moved to fresh pasture, everyone working on food.
Our BCS walking tractor with the power harrow that stirs the soil (and doesn’t till), idles near winter chard and kale bunch greens that we will move a caterpillar over in the coming weeks. While we still use the 4 wheel tractor a ton, this small walking tractor does all the bed shaping and is a work horse for minimizing soil disturbance.
Here’s a seasonal transition for you: Friday morning, we all harvest sweet peppers, separating the stages of ripeness (upper right), then immediately proceed to tearing out the trellising and uprooting plants, hauling them out of the tunnel to compost (upper left). By Friday evening, beds are prepped and ready, Saturday Tyler hustled home from market setup to get many thousands of transplants in using our paper pot transplanter, and the tunnel is now growing 6 beds of “mild winter salad mix” and one bed of spicy mix for the winter farmstore, winter farm members, and the Bitter Root Brewery. We try to get a little better at the winter growing each year, and more than anything it’s about timing—just two or three days earlier for these transplants can mean the different between being harvestable in December and January, or not.
LOTS of those peppers went to market on Saturday, but we do still have half of one of our coolers stuffed with crates of peppers, so we figure it is time to finally get out that pepper roaster and celebrate this seasonal milestone. We’ll have it fired up this week only, on Tuesday from 4:00-6:00 for farm members and folks who’d like to purchase some bulk peppers to roast; it works great to take them home and pack them into freezer bags for winter.
Meanwhile, the SRF farmers’ market team hustles at this week’s Apple Day market. It’s really been all we can do this year to keep up with customers at market. If you’ve been turned off by the lines this year, you can come to our farmstore anytime and with our winter transplant season now finished, we’ll have four of us at market for more time.
Oh Brussels sprouts. This crop is our achilles heel, one of our not-rocking it areas this year (again). While this photo may look impressive, we struggled yet again with a wicked infestation of fall aphids. We are going to make one more attempt at cleaning tomorrow morning, and are really hoping that we can get at least some of them clean enough to stock to the farmstore for you.
We’ve been talking a lot about winter here, so you may be wondering what the deal is…..we are assessing our winter storage crops and calculating what to expect from all these greens plantings, so we will announce winter membership signups soon, once we settle on a few of those key details. Farm members (current season and past winter-season members) get the first shot at signups, but there are usually a few spaces open for new folks as well, so stay tuned to upcoming newsletters for that.
In the meantime, the meal ideas this time of year are endless….we have all the greens, including spinach, which we think is so delicious with some warm beets (steamed, roasted, or sautéed with a splash of balsamic vinegar at the end), or with tomatoes and sliced sweet peppers. You can blend up one of those roasted sweet peppers with olive oil, red wine vinegar, a dash of mustard, small garlic clove and a tablespoon or so of chopped onion for a delicious dressing. Don’t forget the cabbage and carrot slaws, perhaps on the side of your shishito pepper burger (a Sabrina invention, she recommends sautéing the peppers as you usually do first, trimming off the stems, then enveloping them in your regular burger-patty forming, and cooking up as usual). Burritos, tacos, loaded with sweet and hot (or hot-is) peppers, fresh tomato or tomatillo salsa, shredded cabbage, etc.. Quiche of frittata with greens, peppers, and tomatoes. Quinoia tossed with diced tomatoes, sautéed chard or kale, diced red onion, and your favorite dressing. It really does go on and on!
But, in case you are wondering, the winter squash in the greenhouse are mostly not quite ready yet….they will move to the farmstore as they become available, so feel free to peek in and admire them, but just be patient for them to actually be ready to purchase and eat!
We hope we’ll see you at the farm this Tuesday, or at market on Saturday. We come to market rain, shine, snow showers, etc., right on through the final Saturday in October, so we have four more to go and hope you can make it.
Good eating to you,
Noah, Mary, and the whole SweetRoot Crew
Market these days is a bit of a blur…we stock as fast as we can, we try to tally up and help people out as quickly as possible so no one gets frustrated by the lines, and in the midst of all that try to also keep the conversations, connections, and magic growing.
Carrots may be more generally popular, but we think beets are the heart of a good winter food supply too….and wow do we have some good storage beets piling up this year, with all the goodness of summer sun concentrated for your winter eating. Tyler is becoming a root washer specialist and he may not even realize how many hundreds of pounds will be running through that barrel the next few weeks, with carrots, beets, radishes, and potatoes all still coming in from the field.
The ladies moved to fresh, lush, pasture this week, and they are working as hard as they can to keep you supplied. Eggs are such a popular and also tricky product….we can’t let them pile up, but if the girls slow down for fall even just 5 or 10%, it can wreak havoc on the market and farmstore supply. If you’ve been skunked, we are sorry and we (and they) are working to keep the egg flow steady, so don’t worry too much.