Wednesday night, we had our first frost. That's earlier than I had predicted with my full moon theory, but about on schedule for what we should expect up here. Then last night, we had our first freeze! What the heck happened to frosts in September, leading up to the first freeze in October?! Last year, our first freeze was about 4 weeks later than this, on the second week in October for comparison. Pam and Toby of the Griggs Cattle Company live about 4 miles down the road from us, and they reported 21 degrees this morning at their place! Uffda - but that's farming! So yesterday, farmers Ryan, Eric, and I put in one heck of a 12+ hour day to get ready for the early onset of cold. Even using tractors for the real heavy lifting, farming can be physically demanding. I wish we had a pedometer or some way to measure the miles we walked yesterday carrying heavy things. The "farm gym" is relentless sometimes - my legs are still sore this morning!
We spent the morning bagging onions up in the field, and stacking the mesh bags in the greenhouse to finish drying down. They are looking good! After lunch, we headed over to the winter squash field to harvest as much butternut, acorn, delicata, and kabocha winter squash as we could. We worked until dark, and it was all hands on deck. The kids even offered to pitch in for a while after dinner. Family farming at it's finest. 
Last year, our butternut squash crop was damaged badly by a hail storm in August, so supplies were limited. That thin butternut skin was no match for wind driven icy pellets. The resulting wounds in the squash skin were vectors for disease to prematurely rot the fruits in the field, and we harvested only about 10% of the planting. This year I am happy to say we had NO hail in August, and we prioritized harvesting butternuts first yesterday to make sure we had plenty this fall. And it's not just us people that like those sweet butternuts- the deer always start eating the butternut before any other squash. That says something!
We did leave one row of butternut in the field - the trial patch. We're working with several other farms in our region to evaluate some new varieties of butternut squash. The standard butternut squash tends to be pretty big, 3-5# for the small ones, 5-8+# on the larger ones. This is great for large families or for processing, but nowadays most of us don't have families quite so large, and eating all that squash at once can be challenging. Most of the varieties we are evaluating are for smaller sized squash. Just look at the size difference between these 2 butternuts - clove of garlic for scale. The smaller one is .74#, while the larger one is over 7#! Variety trials like these give us some good information on how different cultivars perform in the field under organic management, helping us evaluate disease resistance and growth characteristics as well as fruit size, taste, and quality. It's important to balance trying new crops/varieties with sticking to the "tried and true" varieties, but done right these trials take a lot of extra time. When we harvest these trials, we'll be weighing, counting, and measuring every fruit from each variety (small plots of each variety replicated several times down the length of the bed) to get the best data. It's a time consuming task, so yesterday we just covered that plot with row cover and focused on getting as many pounds of squash harvested from the main plantings. We'll come back to that plot next week.
While we were outside hauling squash after dinner, my wife was busy making pesto to put up in the freezer for winter. It was a big batch, and should last us well over a year! Putting up food after a long day of work can be tiring for sure, but our winter selves will be thankful for the efforts when we can reach in the freezer during the cold dark days of winter for some deliciousness that was preserved from the bounty of summer. Pesto pizza hits the spot after a day of skiing! Our basil is in one of the hoophouses and survived the cold last night, so if you'd like to put up some pesto we'll have one more round of 1# bulk bags of basil available for the veggie boxes this week. Next week, we're pulling out the basil to make room for more winter spinach plantings, so now's your chance!
One final reminder - your summer CSA boxes will continue until the end of October. If you'd like to keep the good stuff coming all winter long, consider signing up for a winter CSA box, which run twice a month now from November through March! Along with all the great meat and value added products, we'll have lots of great storage veggies and winter greens as well as some frozen veggies that Karra has been putting up for you in kitchen of the Bayfield Apple Company. On behalf of all the farmers and producers in our Bayfield Foods Cooperative, we are incredibly grateful for your support of local foods, and it's an honor to be working with you!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
