October 26th, 2023
What’s in your share?
Broccoli or Kale or Beets
Yellow Onions
Sweet Potatoes*
Tomatoes or Eggplant
Peppers
Scallions*
Salad Mix
*Sweet Potatoes - I can’t say that our sweet potatoes are the prettiest crops we’ve ever grown; but they do taste good. This was our second season trying to grow them upon my insistence, so we’ll see if we do it again. The unsightly skin on them is likely due to the 5 inches of rain that fell before we harvested them, but we’ve been peeling them and they taste great. I can’t say much for their storage-ability but I can’t imagine they will get prettier with time, so eat em up!
*Scallions - don’t really need any special instructions but they deserve a special mention this week. We’ve been working with Oak Creek Strides, a Special Education program run by the school district to help students with special needs get real world job experiences. The program is for students who are 18-21 years old and gives them the opportunity to travel in small groups to a diverse range of local businesses such as restaurants, gyms, retail stores, and now our farm, to try out different tasks and experience new potential interests. The Strides crew came this past Friday and helped clean and bunch every last bunch of scallions. This is a tedious job that requires an assembly line, so it was a great job to do with a team!
Purple broccolini is slowly starting to show up in the shares. It just started heading, so we’ll switch off which dropsites get it for the rest of the season.
It’s time to plant garlic! But because we’re sticklers for the plan, we need to come up with our crop layout for next season before we just plant 4 beds of garlic somewhere random. You’d think this was a great task to do curled up with a blanket, watching the snow fall in the middle of the winter, but nope! We also like to order our seeds really early, because they often sell out, so having the crop plan finished before the current season ends helps up be able to order our seeds. This planning phase also includes improving how we run the CSA, adding or subtracting certain crops that perform well or consistently give us trouble, and the forever goal of improving efficiency while also tending to the increasing demands of our soon-to-be-aging bodies.
Heads of greens coming your way! If all goes according to plan, there will be head lettuce in all of the remaining shares (and one head of radicchio, love it or not!)