It was a good week. On Saturday we had our best farmer’s market ever, in terms of sales, which was pretty satisfying, especially since we’re without any WWOOFers helping us on the farm now – and looks like we might be without any for the rest of the season!

Fortunately, we still can get by with a little help from our friends – and our family. Kristin’s folks come out and hang out with Otis every Saturday morning while we harvest and sell for the market, and every Tuesday while we harvest and pack your CSA boxes. Our friends Steffan, Darren, & Dedrick have often been showing up to help us with the biweekly harvests as well – and it looks like Marty, who spent two seasons with us a few years back, is going to come out to help soon too! We are constantly reminded of how lucky we are to have the network of support we exist within.

This week our time was spent in late summer/autumn mode: Kristin has been pickling and canning more, and I’ve been spending more time foraging things for her to preserve.

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Fortunately, the foraging has been better than i thought it might be – although raspberries, choke cherries, plums and grapes are indeed not producing much, the blackberries and wild black cherries are booming. And it turns out Otis quite enjoys joining me on these forays into the woods around our homestead!

In & Along Side the Box

a Watermelon – yours might be yellow, or might be red inside – either way, should be delicious!

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Patterson Onions

Shishito & Bell Peppers – Sautee your Shishitos!

Heirloom & Cherry Tomatoes

Brussels Sprouts Tops – to get a nice git harvest of Sprouts later this season, we cut off the (tasty & edible) tops of the plants, so they put energy into growing nice fat buds rather than additional height. Treat them like kale or any other sturdy green.

Blue & Red Potatoes

a bag of Parsley & (Purple and Mammoth Italian) Basil

Cucumber – starting to wind down for the season, but still puttin’ em out!

Zucchini – ooooh yeaaaah

Okra? – two random boxes got bags of okra this week … was it you?

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We’re entering that time of the season when weeding, mulching, and planting – the primary activities of early season – give way almost entirely to harvesting, harvesting, and harvesting.

This week our trio of summer WWOOFers, Lukas, Brittany, and Alissa, hit the road for destinations westward, scattering across the Dakota plains toward Montana and Oregon; now we’re alone on the Farm until September. Wild foraging has kicked into gear again – we finally have time to venture into the woods to search, and nature’s bounty is providing again.

It seems like generally a poor season, as the late June frost nipped most of the wild plums, grapes, and cherries in the buds. But we’re getting a decent flush of blackberries in our woods, and our lobster mushroom patches are lobstering again.

We also found time to visit family and friends, bring Otis to a parade and a soap box derby, and start plotting what kind of route we’ll want to take throughout the Southland this winter … which is definitely coming. Hopefully not until we’ve had a chance to enjoy a nice long autumn though! And even that, not yet.

In the Box

• Buttercrunch Head Lettuce
• Sweet Peppers – bells and … non-bells that go by the name Sirenbyi.
• Sweet Corn – yeah, sadly in spite of our rescue efforts, the corn didn’t recover from being flattened in the windstorm very well, so there is just an ear in each box again. It happened at just the wrong time for the plants, which were tasseling at the time; many of the stalks, while still alive, simply didn’t produce any cobs at all. Que sera, sera!
• Carrots

• Tomatoes – we planted half again as many tomatoes in our high tunnel this year, and the warmer temps this creates has really helped us get a good crop of tomatoes, during a year when many producers are swearing at field tomatoes that are simply refusing to ripen. Yay!

• Shallots
• Eggplant
• Zucchini

• Cucumbers – you might have gotten one of the special light green, wrinkly variety – enjoy a unique and tender-skinned slicer!
• Bag o’ Broccoli
• Okra? – two lucky shareholders got a bag of Okra this week! Don’t be scared, fellow Northerners – try one of these recipes perhaps? You’ll want to use your okra in the next few days for best results.

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Yeah so I suppose that in case you weren’t a boy in the mid-80s, I should explain that “Over the Top” was a movie that cast Sly Stallone as Rocky of the arm wrestling circuit. The phrase in that context had to do with literally getting the opponent’s hand over the top and down, and about victory, and some other feel-good triumphant stuff.

And here we are at the mid-point of the CSA harvest season – 9 boxes down and 9 left to go, cresting Over the Top of the hump, grunt-screaming and flexing our sweaty, straining, shaky-vein biceps with every beastly zucchini and cucumber we pull from the field.

Totally.

(It’s actually been pretty chill, really. The field is flowing and fertile, it’s kind of dry, but that’s not so bad.)

In addition to making life into 80’s arm wrestling metaphors this week, we’ve been transplanting baby salad greens out into the field, weeding the carrots and new beets and the emptied-out rows of early-harvested crops, and pulling out giant mega weeds from anywhere they’ve raised their monstrous bodies, before they can go to seed.

Speaking of the field, a troop of 13-lined ground squirrels have moved in and are continuing the destructive work of erstwhile evil Madam Venison …Kristin is considering focusing her murder-eye upon them, which will be their doom if they repent not from their sins.

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Oh hey, I took a picture of the compost this week to explain the next step of the “compost-shuffle” to our awesome help-squad (WWOOFers Brittany, Lukas, & Alissa), which reminds me that everyone out there is no doubt dying to know about how we’ve been turning food waste into healthy soil this year!

You may remember that in previous years we made compost from weekly 60-gallon batches of kitchen scraps, courtesy of a cafeteria client. Sadly, that option came to an end this spring – but when the God of Garbage closes a trashcan, he opens a bucket, as they say. Our friends at the newly-opened Trap Rock Brewery have been brewing up all kinds of new beer, and providing us with the byproduct – a steady stream of around 50 gallons of spent grains weekly.

These are still full of nutrients and even protein – making them ideal for our existing composting method; first, let the chickens work it over and eat their fill. Then, after it is no longer fresh, we combine it with pulled weeds, damaged/excess veggies, and dead leaves (we stockpile them every autumn) and stir it occasionally as it decomposes. When the heat dies down, the pile goes into big bins for storage.

Come spring, we’ll use this to feed and build the soil up in the high tunnel and field rows, constantly building the organic matter and nutrients available in our soil. The circle of life!

In the Box

Two or three of you got randomly granted OKRA by the gods. Use it wisely!

Eggplant – You remember these! Good for ratatouille! Great marinated & then grilled.

Kohlrabi

Sweet Corn– very little was ready this week – and sadly many of the stalks knocked down in the wind storm didn’t produce ears – but hopefully more to come … hopefully. Corn might be on the losing side of the win-some-lose-some equation this year.

Tomatoes for now and later – We put both ripe and nearly-ripe tomatoes in the boxes – the nearly ripe ones will feel firmer, and can be left on the counter for a few days to finish ripening up.

Beets & Beet Greens – treat them like Chard basically

Zucchini – yup

Cucumbers – ayuh

Onions – the first of our main onion crop! If you want to store them, simply cut off the greens and use those, then let the bulbs sit on the counter. The outer skin will dry up and form a wonderful protective barrier.

Basil in a bag with a few stalks of Cutting Celery, which is basically an herb that provides celery flavor which you can chop up and put into egg salad or something

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Well, remind me to be careful because when Kristin puts her mind to murder, things move quickly.

Within moments of contacting the USDA, they had a guy out to examine our crop damage, about six seconds after he left the farm the approval paperwork arrived in the mail, and in that same breath our friend Bob got his Wisconsin hunting license and transformed Evil Bambi into a freezerful of venison with a perfect headshot.

So that was pretty sweet. We enjoyed our first garden-fattened venison yesterday, with some jalepeno cornbread pancakes ( w/peppers & corn we’d grown), plus foraged raspberry sauce and a side of fried lobster mushrooms from our woods. It was a most satisfying meal to eat while surveying our little patch of heaven from the screen porch.

In the Box

Tomatoes – first of the season! You’ll find one of our larger tomatoes, either ripe or nearly so, and some ripe cherry tomatoes.

Cabbage or kohlrabi – Your veggie karma determines which one is in your box!

Red Potatoes – our first spuds harvested this year. They have very thin skins because they haven’t been cured; so you really don’t have to skin them for use in your cooking.

Zucchini – one each of three color varieties.

Cucumbers –including a few of a new variety we’ve been enjoying. (If you got a weird pale green, wrinkly thing in your box, it’s one of them! Enjoy.

A medley of Beans –  a mix of our yellow, green, and purples in with

a Bag o’ Broccoli – a mix of baby broccoli and side shoots.

Rutabaga – well, the beneficial nematodes were not a magic bullet against the root munching monsters. They definitely look a lot better than last year, though! You can roast them with your potatoes, scare a co-worker, or whatever.

Garlic – one head of our hard-won little crop of survivors that we planted last fall and left to fend for themselves throughout the harsh and hungry winter.

Parsley

Okra – a random three shareholders got a bag of okra this week! If you were one of the lucky ones, but you aren’t really sure what to do with it, here’s Kristin’s advice: “one popular way of preparing it is slicing it, tossing it with cornmeal, and frying it. I like to sautee the pods whole over high heat until they start to blacken a little, add garlic and cook for maybe another minute, then add soy sauce or salt.”

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