First of all: thank you to all of you who came out last week to the pepper roasting festivities. In the frenzy I don’t think we caught a single photo, but we relish the memory of the circle of folks standing around the roaster visiting, sharing cooking ideas, and waiting patiently and cheerfully for batches of peppers to sizzle to perfection. We thought it would be the only roast this year, but we need to set up that roaster for processing some “farmer grade” peppers for our whole team, so we are opening up one more round, this time by reservation so we can be a little more organized and still get to some of our other critical farmwork. If you missed last week’s roast, or you already ate all of your peppers from that round, you can go to this simple form to sign up for a batch of peppers. This is the last call for the roaster, as we’ll be loaning it out to some farmer friends later this week, but we’ll still have peppers for a few more weeks that you to roast at home if you get hooked! In the coming week watch for an email to sign up for other fall bulk deals and stock-ups for things like cabbage, carrots, kale & chard, beets, potatoes etc..
We are approaching the last call on flowers too, so we are welcoming anyone to take a stroll through our extra flower block (was intended as a you-pick patch, but the season got away) this Tuesday during hosted farmstore time, as well. Bring your own snips and a bucket or cup for your flowers (no glass in the field through, please!) Check in at the farmstore for directions of how to find it, and perhaps a tour with someone from the flower team.
Read on for more news and images from the farm, and come on out to load up at the farmstore or at the market this week.
We are a minimal-tillage farm but potatoes require some serious soil disturbance, and all hands on deck for picking them up.
It’s turnover time. The first solid frost last week killed back the leaves of the winter squash, the death of green above revealing the bright abundance underneath. Trying to stay ahead of the next, could-be-bigger frost, we’ve started piling them into the greenhouse to cure for winter.
We’ve been busy starting to get bulk crops out of the field, cover-crops seeded, and some of the final fall greens areas for winter prepped and seeded. The weedy mess that was the potato beds is bare and flayed open from the harvest, but ready to have beds re-shaped, and soil mulched and tarped to prepare for next spring. The farm land transforms completely over the past few and next few weeks; zucchini already mowed, tomatoes in the big tunnel will be ripped out this week after a final harvest to make way for winter salad greens(don't worry, the caterpillar tunnel planting gets to stay a few more weeks).
Potato harvest from above. Sabrina, Mary, Austin, and Carly pick up tubers after Noah ran the potato harvester through the beds.
On the human turnover front, Noah’s getting back to storytelling—exciting stuff, but it requires some moments of not-farming which can be hard to create. We said goodbye last week to Carly and Austin, who had put in five solid months at the farm before needing to leave early to help family; with deep appreciation for all the work in they put in over those months, we’ll be missing them in these final six weeks of market season and fall harvests. Lucky for us, one farm member with farm experience stepped in to work part time while in between jobs, helping make up a bit of the workload as we tend to winter crops, seed the last of them, and continue with both regular harvests, and start some of the big bulk harvests.
With hands in short supply, don’t be surprised if the newsletters get sporadic, if the market team seems a little tired, or if the farmers simply give you a wave instead of a visit when you stop by the farmstore. Also, in classic fall-season contrast, while shorten hands, we are long on produce—we have more food than ever! For next week we’ll have a signup form to let you reserve bulk quantities of storage roots, greens, etc. that will let you pick up some good fall produce to fill your freezers, your root cellars, etc.. Watch for that signup by the end of this week.
The world of what is to come: our winter squash block, a few days ago before we started harvest. It’s always amazing how the death and the plenty weave together in here after a perfect frost.
Still harvesting greens twice a week, not stopping anytime soon.
Flail mowing sunflower stalk residue to push into the compost with hopes of faster breakdown.
The you-pick flower block that never quite happened…in a short-staffed season, tending and hosting the you-pick venture never quite landed high enough up on the priorities list. The pollinators loved it all though, and the blackbirds, sparrows, and other birds are all over as it goes to seed. There are still quite a few blooms going, and you are welcome to brave the weedy wild-ness of it yourselves this week to pick a handful for yourself before the harder frosts set in.