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.
just one of the several rain storms dropped almost 2″
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.
pepper with a hailstone bruisewind damage in the field
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.
WWOOFer Mercedes w/ Special Friend, processing lobster mushrooms for the market
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)
Kristin’s baby hognose buddy
Mercedes labelling newly-made preserves for the market
WWOOFer Jeff discovered this stinging (Io moth) caterpillar by stepping on it barefoot. ouch
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.
baby beets emerging
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.
Lobster & chicken of the woods mushrooms amongst the farm produce at the Saint Croix Falls Farmers Market
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!
dead oak about to fall
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.
vole-damaged beets for us to eat
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.)
Kristin, Mercedes, & Tristan seeding the fall crops
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!
chanterelle mushroom sautee
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).
sorting and cleaning the lobster mushrooms
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.
Anise Hyssop Apple Jelly glowing in the evening sunSumac flowers on their way to beverage form
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:
Dent corn – if your sweet corn looks like this, you’ve been struck by the cross-pollination gremlins. SAD FACE
This is how your sweet corn should look if it’s unmolested by the cross-pollination gremlins.
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.
we get to eat the ‘ ugly’ & damaged tomatoes
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
a massive sneaky cuke hanging out with the amaranth
Eggplant
Zucchini
Beans – we thought they were almost done … nope! SO MANY BEANS TO PICK TODAY
Neighbor Marcia showed up in matching Otis garb
gargoyle chicken
Ace ripped out the center of his frisbee and now runs around with it like this
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!
okra reaching for the sky
forager boys return from the woods
doing the compost shuffle – preparing for next spring’s needs
freaky trident okra
wild blackberry jammin’
wild chokecherries after having their juices pressed out
The wild chokecherries are putting out tons of fruit in the Barrens around the farm, so we’ve been busy foraging them by the bucketload, to make into chokecherry jelly, jam, and syrup – great for us to enjoy, and something we can sell well at the farmer’s market, to make some money even though our vegetable production is still rather impaired by the slow and complicated start of our growing season this year.
Seems like almost everyone who sees it has fond memories of picking as a kid, or the tart, delicious jelly that grandma loved to make. (If you want to buy a jar or three, let us know – we could deliver with your box!)
The foraging of these wild cherries has us delving deep into the logging roads and fire lanes through the scrubby, sandy wilds. Usually, this involves our All Wheel Drive Subaru – but on Saturday night, we ended up accidentally foraging in the minivan. Down the two track dirt roads, into the wild curves, dropping into the valley away from any GPS or phone service,
Kristin, WWOOFers Jeff and Madeline, Otis, Ace, and Widget all aboard as we got confused about what might lie ahead, and concerned we might be headed into a dead-end difficult to turn out of.
So we turned around and started back the way we’d come. It had been a wild ride, but doable. Of course, we’d had gravity on our side. And now, it was working against us – or perhaps, in favor of us having a memorable adventure. In short order, we were well and truly stuck, the van having excavated a pit around the front passenger tire, the van resting on a deep, soft bed of sand.
The sun was setting, we were miles from anything, with two dogs and a baby. Fortunately, when I hiked up the hill, I was able to get phone service – and even more fortunately, was able to get in touch with our amazing neighbor (and CSA Member!) Marcia, who came and rescued us, as we walked down the road in our mosquito netting, as Otis laughed and cooed and thought this novel experience was the most fun he’d had in days.
The next morning, Neighbor Dave – the other half of the Marquardt Search & Rescue Operation – came out with his truck and helped pull the van out of the sand pit it languished in – freeing it up for us to go out the next day and bring home another few gallons of wild cherries – this time, avoiding the treacherous hill.
Back home, the summer is coming on fully, The tomatoes are ripening, the weeds are much more subdued, the fall salad greens are happy in their trays, looking forward to being transplanted out into the garden.
tomato plants taller than us and still growing
The mosquitoes are still pretty active, although less than they were a few weeks back. Rodents continue to pillage the crops, although their depredations are less noticeable in this period of larger and more abundant production. Sounded like a couple of coyotes battled to the death in the woods next to us the other night, or maybe they were just making out, it’s hard to say.
No hay mulching was performed this week. And Otis is continuing to love life as a first-generation farm kid.
Week 8 Box – Stuffed with Summer
Mild Peppers (Bell & a variety I cant recall the name of just now)
an Eggplant
Tomatoes (Taxi, Damsel, Sun Gold, Black Cherry, and Cherry Bomb are the first varieties to ripen)
Parsley – chop it up into your vegetable sauté? We had it in lentil patties (kind of like flattened falafels) …
Broccoli or Okra – fate decreed you received the one you did. Unless you’ve told us you prefer one maybe.
Kale – A few leaves of 4 different varieties! (The holes munched here and there are how you know we don’t spray pesticides. :))
Cucumbers – Babies like to teethe on these, as shareholder’s spawn Aster demonstrates here:
Zucchinis – you know what to do.
Otis watches Grandpa Ger repairing the defective outlet on our inverterfigured out why we were hardly getting any eggs …
and discovered a secret nest in the weeds atop the root cellar … meet the new mama of 4 new lil chicks
