Bok Choi – Kristin loves this stuff – the flavorful leaves, the crunchy stems … good raw and in soup. Last one for the year, so you better enjoy it dammit.
Sweet Peppers – A stuffed pepper casserole might be a good play this week, because you are blessed with a tasty pepper tsunami! Kristin eats about five of them every time she picks peppers. They also make good refrigerator pickles and go great in salads!
Perhaps fry up a bunch of peppers and onion with sausage or thin cut beef or mushrooms? mmmm
Crimson Giant Radishes – also good either raw or cooked, the latter being the way to go if you’re not into the in-your-face radish flavor.
Broccoli – The fall crop is in!
Spaghetti Squash
Onions
Eggplant – again! But this is the very last time.
Heirloom & Cherry Tomatoes – the peak summer quality may be fading, but these are still a damn sight tastier than snowballs. Or any of the watery excuses for tomatoes you’re likely to see for the next 10 months or so …
a Cucumber
Purple Basil – combine with your tomatoes for glorious victory.
zucchini, melons and tomatoes that don’t pass QC are sliced in half and fed to the chickens
Another lovely week in our little paradise in the Barrens!
In the field, many things are showing their age – the crops that have been in all year are fading, even as the fall crops greens, kohlrabi, radishes, broccoli – are coming up strong and new.
It’s hard to believe that we’re already up to week 15 … the final 3-2-1 countdown begins next week! Ahh! Don’t forget he end of year party is on October 22nd … mark your calendars and prepare to enjoy delicious pizza ….
Box 15 Containeth:
Kohlrabi ala cart – We forgot that we had to fit these in, until after we’d already packed everything up nice and full … so you get yours on the side this week!
Edamame – Don’t try to eat the pods, not tasty! These “fresh soybeans” can be boiled for 5 to 10 minutes, and then strained and salted – and then you can pull the beans out of the pod with your teeth, enjoying the salty pod exterior but eating only the beans. Or instead, you could remove the beans after boiling, and make hummus or enjoy them in a salad or stir-fry. As rich in Protein as they are in Tasty!
Bear helps us pluck pods from edamame plants
(If you don’t want to use them right away, you can freeze them for later in a ziplock.)
Honeycrisp Apples – A wonderful local farmer’s market friend let us pick her tree of delicious honeycrisps, and we wanted to share the bounty with y’all. These are a wonderful apple for simply eating as they are.
Chop Salad Mix – (red & green lettuce, mizuna, spinach, pea tips, tat soi, arugula, edible nasturtium flowers) – big leafy goodness, and a nice big FU to the looming threat of winter.
Carrots – Monsters!! We do this on purpose because they’re awesome! Just as tasty as normal carrots – they just take more time in the field to get this way.
French Breakfast Radishes – tiny flavor bombs! Cut the greens off if you’re not going to eat them soon, so they don’t make the roots rubbery and sad.
Sweet Spanish Onions – a not-so-pungent variety, with higher sugar content and less onionsmack
a Zucchini – such versatility.
Sweet Pepper Medley
Heirloom Tomatoes – some are ripe, some will ripen over the next few days on your counter. These are mostly from our high tunnel, as they field tomato plants are being relentless destroyed by the forces of entropy … but the ones inside, sheltered from nature and wind-born fungal assaults, are quite enjoying the return of warm sunny weather … as we all have!
It worked! We declared Summer to be over last week, and this successfully tricked warm weather into returning, hooray! I learned this trick from Kristin, who has found that she can make it rain by deciding to leave the clothes hanging on the line, or make storms miss us by taking the laundry in. Good deal, hope y’all are enjoying this sunny warmth – Future Winter You will thank you for it.
It was a lovely late summer / early fall week, with all the activities this time of year entails on the farm.
the BLD (Block Laying Dudes) hard at work
We had a bonfire or two, worked on projects, harvested watermelons and squash, juiced watermelons, wood-smoked veggies for salsa, and canned and preserved said salsa, as well as a sweet and spicy chili sauce, eggplant-tomato relish & baba ganoush (which is why you didn’t get an eggplant this week, apologies or you’re-welcome, depending on your Eggplant Stance).
chickens feast on the remains of juiced watermelons
(While we make use of all we need to, we do have a lot of hot peppers – so if you want some, definitely let us know!)
This week our imported friend and helper Azela led her first yoga class on the farm, as the gray skies cleared up and ended the session with glorious sunshine (her next class is this Sunday if you’re interested!),
The tomato plants have slowed way down, and more and more of them have decided to call it good for the season, leaving us with an abundance of green tomatoes. As the weather prepares to pivot toward wintertime, we have been amazed and gratified to see the root cellar rising up – the walls are full height now, and it’s clear we can get it done (or close enough anyway) before the snow flies … lumber is ordered to build the sturdy supporting forms for the next step – the poured concrete roof!
Soon we’ll be able to dig up the hundreds of feet of potatoes we have in “field storage” (left in place underground in the rows, with the above-ground plant removed), and store them away in this buried concrete fortress, where the dastardly voles cannot chew through them!
Week 14 – The Box
Neither Zucchini nor Eggplant – what!?
Brussels Sprouts – Kristin likes to blanch & halve them, then roast with butter. You could also pan fry them in cast iron with bacon!
Rob bagging Brussels
Fall Salad Mix – (lettuce, bekana, pea tips, arugula, tat soi, spinach, and nasturtium flowers) – salad season part two is upon us!!
Spaghetti Squash – easiest to cut it half, scoop out the seeds in the middle, put it cut-side down on a baking sheet and roast in the oven until you can scrap out the strands with a fork. Add a shallot and Parmesan wine sauce perhaps! Or you could make it sweet, like other winter squashes, with brown sugar, butter, and cinnamon!
Shallots
a Cucumber – We’ve been enjoying a simple cold salad on the farm this week with sliced cucumber, shallot, and tomato, with oil, salt and pepper.
Beets
Fennel – we’ve been eating ours thinky sliced on salads and enjoying it plenty!
Parsley
Sweet Peppers – no hot ones this week!
Tomatoes – hopefully the plants resurge a bit with this new heat – the cold damp weather really set them back …
bag o’ mixed Cherry Tomatoes
That’s all for this week! Hope you love eating it all as much as we’ve loved growing it for you!
culling the unripe and overripe and bug-chewed from the ground cherry harvest for the Saint Croix Falls Farmer’s Market
Kristin’s gloved hands carefully showing off the spiny Garden Lychee Berries we are testing out in the high tunnel this year …
The weather may be beautiful, and we’ll likely have plenty of warm and sunny days before Winter is here … but at this point, I think we all might need to face the fact that Summer is now past us.
There are sumacs and aspen and oaks starting their change into their autumn warm tones, and tonight we’re rushing home to cover the pepper plants … the low will possibly be dipping into the thirties on the farm!
This week, we built up the root cellar further (over half done with the walls!), and created fire cider (thanks for the horseradish, Russ!), corn relish, and more of our pinion pine hand salve.
root cellar growing …. we’re starting on tier 6 now!
Former WWOOFers Nora, B, and their cat Bucket returned for a visit, along with new members of their little tribe – their baby, Bear, and their Cat Windjah … with her 4 unnamed week-old kittens! (Hmmm, that’s three of the ladies from last year who are now mothers … something in the well water perhaps ….)
Lucky Box 13
boxes before the basil bags
Watermelon – one of the 3 varieties – Crimson Sweet, Sugar Baby, and some yellow one who’s name escapes me right now. Consider making a watermelon salad – there are all kinds of recipes out there that would use your melon with fennel, tomatoes, cucumber, etc!
Ground Cherries -Hey, these would go good in a fruit salad too! These are a big pain to harvest and sort, but so worth it! If any are unripe/green, avoid them … we tried to sort out all the chewed up and underripe ones, but a few no doubt slipped through.
Fennel – this is the first year that we got our fennel to bulb! The greens and the bulb are all edible.
assorted Sweet Peppers
Cucumber -just one nice one!
Zucchini – and just one zucchini (or two, if they’re small / you’re lucky)
one Eggplant
a big onion
onions curing in the little greenhouse
Heirloom Tomatoes – the fall diseases have arrived, but our loyal tomatoes are still putting up a good fight in the field – and flourishing in the high tunnel.
Swiss Chard – stems and leaves are edible – just chop them up and sautee ’em!
Thai Basil – great with watermelon!
hay mushroom spore prints on a watermelon
shareholder Tara brought a slack line to the farm for us to play with. Now I’m sore.
the fall salad greens bed is looking good. Should be getting stuff out of it for y’all in a week or two
we cut open an accidentally harvested watermelon, not expecting it to be ripe … but despite appearances, it was. A fluke, or are they ready after all? Stay tuned!
The Boys laid the first course of block for the root cellar, and it looks good.
Kristin swore at the unknown birds eating the final wave of sweet corn corn, and (very) briefly considered one of those devices that randomly noise-cannons to startle birds. We don’t want to live with random shotgun sound effects.
There’s a gopher in the garden.
“the squash is going apeshit”
Azela was frightened by a the amazing mimicry of a harmless hognose snake that looked for all the world like a cobra about to strike.
last season’s WWOOFer Grace came to visit with her new hubby Zach and baby bump Name TBD
We harvested many buckets of organic delicious plums, devoured way too many plums, and preserved many plums for later.
attended Bartender Beth’s hop picking party, which reminded us to pick our own hops
And more!
The Contents of Your Box:
Mount Royal Plums (< that’s a link)- These were too delicious not to share. Every one tastes a little bit different, making it hard to stop eating them. For your own good, we limited your quantity. Thanks to Russ Hanson for letting us pick 30 gallons of them from his one ridiculously prolific (and never-sprayed) tree!
Peppers Both Hot and Sweet – Although I don’t think Kristin intended it to be, this is a test of your Newsletter Reading. … the only hot ones in the bunch are the yellow-colored Golden Cayennes. And they are quite hot indeed.
Kick Butt Heirloom Tomatoes
Shallots – It’s like an onion, but fancy! A little midler, so they’re good raw, and they have that garlic flavor too.
All Blue Potatoes – I say they’re purple but whatever, they’re darn good.
Cucumbers – Some of the last hurrah for the season
Eggplant – Certain of your fellow members would love to hear your eggplant success stories in he comments below.
Tomatillos – These are good to seek out recipes for! Green enchilada sauce?
Purple Basil – It’s pretty and it has good basil flavor, can’t be bad.
We got our labels printed and started selling this season’s canned goods!
