Tonight the low on the farm is predicted to get down to 39 degrees. I guess this season-changing thing is really happening. Other than the basil (which we harvested a ton of today), this chill shouldn’t harm much, but is sure feels like a shot across the bow. Less direct reminders have been coming from all sides this week, as cooler temps and shorter daylight hours have slowed down growth and production, and the well water is numbing rather than refreshing when we’re washing veggies off.

It’s getting into that time of season when we start harvesting things to salvage them from the cold, deciding what to let the cold finish off and what to cover at nights to keep alive just a little bit longer.

We tore the field tomato plants all down this week – although many still had fruits in various stages of ripeness, the plants were mostly bare of leaves, and this seemed to make for increasingly bland flavor. (Fortunately, the high tunnel tomatoes are faring better and still producing, although even there blight is popping up and starting to spread.)

Even as the days darken and the temperatures dip, the Farm will continue to produce – we have planted plenty of cold-hardy plants to carry us through these last few weeks of the season and beyond … for now, there’s all this:

Box 15:

• Celeriac – We cut off the greens so it would fit into your boxes. All of it is edible, although often the stems are used for flavoring soup broth, since they’re sorta chewy. Slicing them up finely avoids that problem though, if you’d like to include them in a dish. The bulbs are often used in soups and stews, as well as salads. It can be eaten fresh or cooked, Google around and find a recipe that sounds interesting!

• Watermelon Radish – This is our first year growing these interesting radishes; we ate one last night, sliced up and raw. Findings: the thick skin is extremely spicy, while the pink interior is totally mild – it would make a nice salad topping, or sliced up and dipped in hummus or dressing, with or without the skin as your tastebuds prefer.
• Leeks
• Tomatoes

• Salad Mix – red & green lettuce, green and red mizuna, red mustard greens, arugula, pea tips, baby bok choi

• Spaghetti Squash
• Sweet Pepper mix
• Eggplant (Asian and Italian)
• Zucchini
• Cucumber
• Basil (both Thai & Italian)

The harvest alarm went off this morning between blasts of ground-shaking thunder, as bathtubs of water dumped down everywhere illuminated by nearly constant lighting.

Clearly, WWOOFer David’s final day with us was going to be a memorable one.

Fortunately, we’d known this was a possibility, and spent much of Monday doing as much as we could in advance; this let us sleep in until past 7 until the worst of the storm had passed, and then finish up what still needed doing in our raincoats.

This was the most recent storm in the recent trend, as summer rages against the dying of the light. The trees have noticed too, and the color changes have started to show among their most eager. And speaking of trees, it’s time to start thinking about turning more standing-dead oaks into piles of curing firewood.

For now, at least, it’s still the tail end of summer, when rain storms can be weathered in a swimsuit, and sunny afternoons still end with trips for ice cream and dips in the river.

BOX 14

• Salad Mix – Red & Green lettuce, red & green mizuna, arugula, wasabi lettuce, & pea tips – big leaves for chopped salads!
• Potatoes
  – one of 3 varieties:Sarah & Marty harvesting potatoesRusset have crackly-looking spotted skins – Idaho potato style. Make great gnocchi, baked potatoes, light-textured mashed potatoes. Won’t hold its shape if you try to cube it, slice it, make fries, etc.
  Yukon Gold – light, smooth, pale skin. Better for potato salads, home fries, and other preparations that require the potato to hold its form.
  Pontiac Red – similar to the Yukons, but with red skins.
• Tomatoes
  
  A variety of heirloom and cherry varieties. This could very well be the last week we’ll have many good tomatoes for the boxes – the field plants are looking mostly ready to be pulled out and disposed of this week, and the high tunnel plants aren’t producing like they once were. So cherish them!
• Carrots –
  orange yellow and purple varieties! Big ones tend to be better to cook with, and small ones may be best enjoyed eaten raw.

• a small zucchini –
  sautee it with some other stuff I reckon
• Tomatillos bagged with Hot Peppers –
  Time to make salsa perhaps, or a green chili? Kristin made a delicious tomatillo soup this week with ours – try it out perhaps? Husk and halve your tomatillos, broil them in a baking pan until they begin to blacken. Puree them with lime juice and garlic cloves. While the broiler is broilering, sautee some onions and peppers in a sauce pan, then add 2-4 cups of broth and shredded chicken /or beans /or hominy etc. Add the tomatillo puree and season to taste with salt and pepper.

• Sweet Peppers –
  loose in the box – Note that there is a red pepper in there loose that looks much like the red cayennes bagged with the tomatillos – don’t be fooled.

  

  The bagged ones are hot, the loose ones (Italian Frying) are not!

• Onions
• Rutabaga –
  

  

  Neighbor Marcie mashed hers – you could try that, perhaps blended with some potatoes. They have a sweet flavor when cooked – and to mash them, you’d want to cook it thouroughly (chunk it and boil it, with or without potatoes).

  Kristin recently has been cubing ours up small and tossing them with coconut oil in a dutch oven, cook them covered over medium heat until tender. Then season with salt & pepper, smoked paprika, or curry.

  

• Eggplant –
  either 1 Italian or 2 Thai eggplants. See previous newsletters for idears if Google isn’t helping.
• Cucumbers –
  little picklers and larger slicers … the late season second planting is producing wonderfully!

Storms herald the battlelines between summer air and the advancing autumnal armies. Nights are cooler – we added a blanket, but refused to close the windows. The sun is coming out later and dipping out earlier, leaving us in the dark for the opening of our early Farmer’s Market harvest, and clipping out formerly productive field time from days’ ends. The mosquitoes are subdued by cold spells and renewed by rainy ones. One recent sundown, we grumbled at a flock of geese that seemed suspiciously southbound.

It’s hard not to start these with weather talk. Maybe there’s no reason to fight it – after all, it’s at the center of growing for you. (Although I have no such excuse for the alliteration.)

After the success of Okra Fest last week, we had to follow it up with Eggplant Fest – where we celebrated the featured vegetable with varied dishes, up to and including dessert. The eggplant incarnations were uniformly tasty: spicy grilled to parmesan crusted baked, smoky baba ganoush, tomato/eggplant relish, and a chai-spiced eggplant pudding. (There were going to be eggplant chips but they took a wrong turn and were abandoned.)

This is how we party now.

The pudding was perhaps surprisingly delicious – especially as it had to compensate for its gray coloration … next time we may brighten it up with some garden huckleberry.

I know I promised / threatened to bombard you with eggplants this week, but we decided to send out just a couple, since we couldn’t fit everything in the boxes already (which is why your watermelons and leeks are ala carte).

(Plus, we ate a ton of them.)

BOX(+) 13

• Leeks – Our first ever harvest of these! Giant onion-grass stalks. If you want to be able to separate the layers, chop off the root end and separate them. Try Googling up a recipe for leek soups, pastas, confit, galettes, pesto … and crispy fried leek greens.

• Watermelon – Yours may be red or might be yellow, but it should be sweet and delicious regardless. I’ve noticed that the seeds can be downright tasty and crunchy when they’re small.

• The Return of Salad Mix – Green & Red Lettuce, Arugula, Pea Tips, Mizuna, Baby Kale That’s the biggest arugula I’ve ever seen – yet still tender and mild. The lettuce is also tender but large-leafed – great for a chopped salad.

• Tomatoes – The plants in the field look like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree for the most part, but there are still fruits ripening…

• Ground Cherries – A team of three people spent the better part of a day first harvesting and then sorting out the bad from the good ones, so that your bag could consist of the tastiest possible fruit!
• Sweet Peppers
• Eggplants (Italian & Asian)

• Kohlrabi – Don’t miss this one – it’s an unusual and worthwhile treat. Lots of ways to eat them but raw is simplest and great, just sliced up and maybe salted or peppered.
• Peppermint and/or Chocolate Mint – You can make tea if you want to, but wouldn’t you rather make a mojito?
• a couple of Cucumbers
• a Zucchini – the storm has passed, and these are on the wane.
• Chicken of the Woods (Large Shares only)  – Kristin found this growing on a tree  next to our driveway during harvest – there was not enough to split up between everyone unfortunately! Wash, slice up, and sautee it with butter. Don’t wash it down with booze. Nope.

Box 12

• Carrots –  We restrained ourselves from harvest early young carrots all season, so they could grow up like these!
• Savory (nope that’s not Rosemary – maybe next year)- would be good with potatoes and with spaghetti squash. You could throw the whole thing into simmering soup, and then fish our the sticks later.
• Red Potatoes

• Spaghetti Squash – Halve it, scoop out the seeds, roast in the oven like any winter squash (or microwave it). Scrape out the strandy innards with a fork to use however you like … we like it with a light sauce like butter, parmesean, and herbs. Maybe some chopped and drained tomatoes; a lot of people try spaghetti sauce, but it kinda just turns it to a pile of mush.  You could also make fritters – combine the cooked flesh with an egg, salt, pepper, maybe herbs, and a little flour. Fry little patties of the results in a pan.
• Beets – a random mix ofThee-Root Grex, Cylindrica, Detroit, Chiogga, Burpee’s Golden, and Red Ace varieties
• Sweet Peppers – Even the scary red ones that look like giant cayenne peppers are mild this week!

• Tomatillos & Cherry Tomatoes
• Beans – Probably the final beans of the season, but some of the later-producing varieties might surprise us, 

• Zucchini
• A lovely slicing cucumber, or two
• Onions

• a single ear of Heirloom Sweet Corn –  You are now fostering a Rescue. The second patch of sweet corn was decimated from above by birds and from below by rodents. Only a few cobs made it through unscathed.

  

  Kristin is harboring suspicions about even the hummingbirds, although woodpeckers are a more likely culprit. Anyway – with just a cob, I’d just cut it off the cob, and add to something else – a salsa, soup, salad …

• Tomatoes – Cursed early blight is wiping out our field crop, inexorably … rage, rage against the dying of the tomatoes!

ugly tomato cart on the way to be preserved

This week the nature that surrounds us really started chowing down on our field, as summer shows signs of weakening and all local life feels the fear of coming winter in our cell membranes.

We, too, are aware of the way summer’s end slips past with such eerie speed, and have started to look at maps, making first forays into planning our snowbird’s flight. Tomatoes are being sauced, corn shucked, beets pickled, and all of it canned up for us to eat over the winter and early spring, when we’re separated from our garden’s fresh sustenance.

Of course, we’re not the only ones loving the garden. The cabbage luper larvae – cute little green caterpillars – are riddling the edible leaves with holes, leaving shotgun blast patterns in cabbages and collards, broccoli and kale. The tunneling voles have taken to increasingly brazen surface raids, gnawing into melons, tomatoes, edamame, beets, potatoes, carrots … pretty much everything.   Mice are raiding all the structures and vehicles, seeking places to nest and steal/stash food. Mosquitoes are desperately seeking the protein they require to bring forth descendants. The rabbit population seems to be held in check by the local gang of coyotes, which sing a bloodlusty song into the night whenever a mammal is made a meal.

Everybody’s hungry –  hopefully including you, gentle shareholder – because we’ve taken a whole lot of food away from the critters of the field to give to you!

Box 11

uffins.

While I can certainly understand why most CSAs are content to let the watermelon take up half f your allotted weekly box, we were fortunate enough to have a whole lot of help with today’s harvest, and with the many helping hands making light work, we were able to pack boxes to the brim, with a melon on the side! Much gratitude to the folks who made it possible … Shareholder Amy, Neighbor Marcia, WWOOFers Grace, David, and Sarah, Friends Steffan, Angela, and Aura  …. it really does take a village to raise a farm, and we’re so grateful to be village people with y’all. Or villagers. Whatever. We love you.

Watermelon – We harvested several varieties of melons this week – Sugar Babies, Early Moonbeams, Peace, and Crimson Sweets-  so you have roughly 50% odds of either a red or a yellow fleshed melon. Let us know if you’re is particularly delicious or not-delicious, so we can have some feedback on our attempts at determining how ripe they are before harvesting!

Ground Cherries – Not actually a cherry, really a sweeter relative of tomatillos. If you haven’t had these before, you’re in for a treat I hope. We had a lot of awesome help for harvest today, so we took the time to really sort through these and remove most of the unripe or damaged fruits. Peel off the husks, or pop them out by squeezing at the back near the stems. Enjoy plain as a snack, or add to pancakes or muffins …

Tomatoes – We are trying to give you as many beautiful heirlooms as we can fit into the boxes, while the plants are still producing them like this … it won’t be long before this seasonal abundance falters, and we all start the annual process of missing them until next year …

Potatoes (All Blue variety) – These do maintain their unusual color even when cooked! How often can a scoop of mashed potatoes look stunning?!

Edamame – Did you practice last week? Here’s the bonanza we promised you … you can do the standard boil/salt/snack thing, or take the time to shell them, cook them, and add a delicious protein into a stirfry – now or later, if you freeze them!

Onions – A mix of red, white, and yellow.

Cucumbers

Zucchini / Summer Squash

Peppers – hot and mild mixes –  The hotties are in a plastic bag, while the mild ones are loose in the box.

An eggplant –  Yours might be green, greenish, purple, or white, skinny or clublike or chubby. Whatever it looks like, it’ll be good!

Collard Greens – One of the crops being munched up by baby cabbage luper moth – we picked the best-looking leaves, but they still bear holes … perfectly edible, just cosmetic damage – made possible by organic pesticide-free growing practices!

Italian Basil          

Yard-Long Beans (Large shares only) – As novel as they are at these incredible lengths, it still seems to work best to cut them into smaller bits before serving … although it’s still kinda fun.