In this week’s news, the plants are senescing (spellcheck doesn’t know that one)! Weeds are dying and leaves are starting to turn! AUTUMN IS COMING! The Harvest Party will be October 14th – mark your calendars! And it’s just 5 boxes left after this one, before Winter comes for us all.

We started the process of planting two new pear trees … but they’re not in the ground yet. First we’ll have to cut down some standing dead oak trees, which meant we first had to move some old tractor implements and a couple of wood piles out of the impact zone.

This, plus starting to build up our winter’s worth of woodpiles “upstairs’ took an entire afternoon … later this week we can cut down the trees, dig and amend the planting holes, etc … and then double our pear tree population!

We did plenty of canning – made fire-roasted salsa, tomato sauce, and some deliciously tart crab apple jelly.

 

 

After a week filled with dry soil and endless near-misses, we finally got rain … as Steffan said, “if it’s going to rain, of course it will be on harvest day!”

We set up a couple of market canopies and hurried to

CSA Box 13

• Tomatoes – enjoy them while we can – we have now started to pull out plants stricken with the dreaded blight, but it will likely spread quickly regardless. Fortunately, hopefully, the plants in the high tunnel – shielded from dew and rain –  are still doing well and should continue to produce at least some goodies to share with you for weeks to come.
• Broccoli –  It’s been a great broccoli year; hope you like it, because we’re happy to be able to give it to you week after week ….

• Cucumbers 
• Zucchini
• Sweet Peppers – bells, Carmen (long red)

• Watermelons – yellow or red

• Onions
• Potatoes – mix of red, gold, & blues
• Fennel – try sautéed with the peppers and some sausage, or roasted with your potatoes?
• Hops – (provided to those who requested them – let us know if you want any next week, there are still plenty!)

 

 

 

 

 

So how about this weather!? We got several inches of rain this week, in addition to some quarter sized hail and a whole lot of wind.

The plants are kind of beat up, but I reckon it’s a worthwhile trade-off if that is what it takes to get some real good soaking rain for the field – especially the newly-seeded fall crops.

 

Out three WWOOFers convinced us to take a day away from the farm to go to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, which turned out to be a wonderful time – dressing up in costume and bringing a young child made it by far the most fun I’ve ever had at the event.

It also helped that there was rain wrongly-forecasted, so there were no lines to get in or get food or get out again! Beautiful.

Today was WWOOFer Mercedes’ final day of her August stay – we’re sad to see her go, but know she’ll be back soon … not least/only because we’re holding her sweet pop-up camper hostage.

Inside Box 12

• Tomatoes –  the field tomatoes are starting to show signs of disease, but we’re still getting plenty of beautiful specimens for you!
• Eggplants –  one large or two smaller ones 
• Peppers – (ripening sweet peppers, and jalepenos (bagged with your broccoli)
• Zucchini 
• Cucumbers 
• Broccoli 
• Melons – (either a honeywhite muskmelon, a cantaloupe, or a Sun Jewel) If you got a cantaloupe, eat it ASAP – they are READY!
• Shallots  
• Spaghetti squash 
• Apples – Picked just before a storm came that would have knocked them all down to be bruised to mush! These are from a tree that Kristin’s folks planted on the farm in the late 70’s! This was a great year for the tree, which hasn’t produced nearly such an abundance since we moved in.
• Beans 
• Basil –  (either Purple or Italian)

 

 

 

 

This week, we gazed upon the expanding collection of damaged/ugly tomatoes on the porch awaiting consumption and/or canning, and felt the late summer pivot point.

Rather than focusing on maximizing future harvests (planting, weeding, mulching, pruning), much of our energy now goes to dealing with the bounty – harvesting, preserving, canning. The night comes earlier and earlier, the night breezes cooler and cooler, and the calendar turn to September draws neigh.

We’ve been turning cucumbers in relish, apples into herb-infused jelly, tomatoes into sauce. The seeds planted last week are all up and looking healthy on the west side of the field.

The surrounding woods have yielded good quantities of lobster and chicken of the woods mushrooms, contributing to our Saturday farmer’s market being the most profitable of the year so far.

The tomatoes are stunning – this is the week or two of peak production before the inevitable blight comes to the field and withers the plants away.

WWOOFers Jeff & Maddy have returned, and are pleasantly surprised to find that the mosquito massacre of July has subsided almost entirely. While Kristin was busy with the baby, Jeff helped saw down two huge standing dead oaks that I’ve been wanting down for years … we need more firewood curing!

 

The Week 11 Box

• Brussels sprouts tops – This is the time of year we top the brussel sprout plants so that they put their energy into the sprouts instead of further vertical growth – and those leaves are super tasty! Here’s some info about eating them!
• Heirloom & Cherry Tomatoes
  
  
• Cucumbers 
• Zucchinis 
• Onions
• Peppers (mostly sweet ones, and a few jalapeños)
• Beets –  the ones that the voles spared.

  

• an Eggplant 
• Broccoli 
• Okra or Tomatilloes –  luck of the draw!
• Sun Jewel Melons –  an asian melon that often splits as they ripen (so don’t worry if yours has cracks in the skin. Firmer flesh than musk melons, and great for breakfast!
• Tri-color Beans – a mix of our green, purple, and yellow beans

I might have to rely on pictures to tell about this week – Otis is quite unhappy to be stuck in his car seat, and he wants to make sure we are very, very aware of it. This makes it hard to think, let alone communicate in coherent written sentences. As usual, of course, que sera, sera …

In short – this week, it was very dry. We are having to run the irrigation, but the rascally rodents have really made Swiss cheese out of many of the drip lines, and our efforts are severely handicapped by the myriad leaks this leaves, even after we’ve attempted to repair them with electrical tape (did you know that standard electrical tape sticks to itself even when wet – or under water? very handy stuff.)

 

Not only has it been hot and dry, but there is no rain at all in our forecast, which is going to make the fall seeds that we just planted slow to take off – we’ll nurture them with irrigation and hose sprayers as much as we can, but there isn’t much that can work the magic of mother nature’s rainfall.

UPDATE: We got home from our trip into the city to discover that we got an inch and a half of rain that was not in the forecast! Happy dance!

We did some foraging – hauling home a good bounty of coral mushrooms, chanterelles, and lobster mushrooms (a strange symbiosis between a not-very-tasty mushroom and a mold which transforms its host into something with a far superior flavor and texture).

We also created several batches of refreshing sumac-ade, and picking the small yellow apples from a tree Kristin’s grandpa planted decades ago, and making them into jelly with hints of minty anise flavor by combining them with our favorite local native plant, Anise Hyssop.

 

All in all, once again, it was a good week. Hope you all agree!

 

the Week 10 Box

• Sweet Corn – hopefully

For some reason, some of our dent corn (grown to make into corn meal) tasselled at the same time as our sweet corn – even though it shouldn’t have been possible. So some of it cross pollinated, resulting in sweet corn that isnt’ sweet at all … but most of it seems ok. But see the pictures below so you’ll be warned if you have a bad one:

 

 

• Tomatoes – a nice mix of salad tomatoes and slicers! Enjoy the softer ripe ones first, while the firmer ones finish ripening up on your counter.

• Carrots – An assortment of this year’s varieties … although for some reason we didn’t see any of the yellow ones today. Hmmm …
• Purple Basil –  it’s like regular basil, but purple!
• Sweet Peppers
• Okra or Broccoli –  If you got a broccoli box, you’re probably in safe and comfortable territory – but if you got okra, you might be a bit scared. Don’t be. It’s delicious and much more versatile than we Northerners usually realize! It’s simple just to sautee the whole pods and enjoy the tasty, crunchy (and not slimy!) pods in a creative dish …
• Cucumbers

• Eggplant
• Zucchini
• Beans –  we thought they were almost done … nope! SO MANY BEANS TO PICK TODAY

Well here we are – halfway through the CSA season! It was, as expected, a challenging start to the season as new parents, but I think it went better than we feared it might, so that’s pretty sweet. The garden is definitely wilder and weedier and less productive than last year, but there haven’t been any outright disasters, and really it’s been kind of fun learning to work around our new limitations and challenges.

This week saw a changing of the guard among our helpers – Jeff and Madeline moved on (yet may still return, it seems!), and three new gals joined us – Michigan Emily, Lacrosse Mercedes, and Maine Tristan.

They have been enjoying foraging for the wild berries that we make into preserves to sell at market, helping clean out the chicken coop, shoveling compost piles from place to place, and of course killing potato beetles and picking produce.

In rodent news, we discovered that the feared rat infestation beneath the chicken yard was just moles after all, which was great news. The bear hunters are rolling past with their truckloads of baying hounds. We did a whole bunch of foraging, and sold the fruits of our labors at the St Croix Falls Farmer’s Market pretty successfully, in spite of the steady Saturday rain. We actually got two inches of much-needed rain on Wednesday in an epic night of lightning and hail and wind and general weather awesomeness.

It was a good week. Life is interesting, fulfilling, and fun …. here’s hoping we all appreciate our many lucky blessings in these days to come!

the Week 9 Box

• Zucchini
• Cucumbers
• Eggplant
• Broccoli & Baby Broccoli 
• Beans
• New Potatoes (Yukon Gold, Norland Red, & All Blue) –  thin skins on these babies, so eat em up soon!

• Tomatoes –  untold variety of varieties!
• Peppers (green pepper & jalapeño)
• Basil
• Shallots –  much smaller than last year although we grew the sam variety – the power of having the weeds under tight control last year was impressive!