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!

 

 

 

This week the garden started to look a bit more like a farm field, and less like a jungle. Don’t get me wrong – there are still towering weeds, masses of bindweed vines, and endless shelter for our several species of herbivorous rodents to sit in the shade and comfortably munch on the fruits of our labor.

But there are several broad swathes of deeply piled hay mulch, and rows of neatly weeded crops growing in the open air and full sunshine, and I find myself making excuses to walk past the ends of the rows just to appreciate them.

It’s odd for us to enjoy such a thing – we’re both more about nature unbounded,organic swoops and curves, coexistence and wu wei and wabi sabi. Well, we still have plenty of that to appreciate – in contrast to the little bits where we’ve brought human order to the land.

We even have the “Western Front” of the garden (in our war on quack grass) tilled deeply … after whacking down the thick weeds that came up seemingly overnight with the “motorized machete” (push mower), I began the struggle of tilling through the remaining roots and weed stalks with our little walk-behind … when I heard “STOP! STOP!” through my hearing protection.

And lo and behold – like an angel there appeared Neighbor Marcia, bearing glad tidings – Neighbor Dave had the tiller attachment hooked up to their tractor, and he could come and make short work of the area I was in if we could take down the fence a bit for access. And now the thick growth has been transformed into a nice fluffy uniform soil, ready to have salad mix, beet, cilantro, and dill seeds sown directly into for the late season’s harvests.

the Week 7 Box

• Cabbage – the last of cabbage until the fall crop comes in. Early Jersey Wakefield is a great coleslaw and sauerkraut cabbage –  but if you ate your last one raw, you may want to try sautéing in butter. If you use a big skillet and give it plenty of space, parts of it will brown and be delicious.
• Cucumbers

• Zucchinis
• Green Beans & Wax Beans
• Beets – With their greens on. Cut them off for storing in the fridge. Greens are good cooked or smoothied. If you don’t like beets, you could always hide them in chocolate cake.

• Purslane – we have a really great crop of self-seeding purslane. After our initial years of only having inedible weeds we are not bothered by this edible and nutritious one. I’ve heard of adding it to pesto and cutting back on the oil for a lighter result.
• Basil – isn’t basil awesome???
• Garlic – The clove wrapping is thicker and not papery because it was just harvested and has not cured yet.