Right now here at Great Oak Farm, we're making a big push to finish harvesting carrots, carrots, and more carrots. Along with brussels sprouts, the carrots are the last field crop left to finish harvesting. Those brussels sprouts are as hardy as they are tasty! This is pretty much the view from here each day:
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This week has been a chilly one - we had our first snow flurries of the fall season. Between pressure washing those big pallet bins clean before they are filled with carrots or pulling carrots out in the field all day, we've had our fair share of cold fingers. Even rubber gloves to keep hands dry only do so much when it's in the mid-thirties outside! But the ground isn't frozen yet, and we're making good progress on the harvest. We are on track to have the carrots all dug and washed up in the next few days, hopefully before even colder temps move in to stay.
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Also, this time of year the deer are hungry, and the carrots are sweet, so we're racing the deer as much as we are racing the cold. You can see in the picture above how much damage they can do - this used to be a nice looking bed of carrots! They like to come in the fields at night and can really do a number on the fall carrot crop. In some places now the carrots are completely eaten down to the dirt, and it looks like a deer square dance rolled through after dark. The ground is churned up by hooves as they paw the dirt to expose as much carrot as possible, the buggers. Uffda.
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This past Tuesday we washed up the beets that we harvested last week, and they look great - though we had planted enough for 5 times that many beets. That ONE big rain - 2.5 inches in 20 minutes - that we got back in early July washed a lot of the beet seeds out right after they were planted unfortunately, but we'll try again next year for a bigger beet harvest. Rain is certainly one of those things that we farmers need in moderation - too little or too much all at once can really be difficult to deal with. It's hard to believe, but here's what it looked like outside of the greenhouse when that storm rolled through this summer:
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This week, in addition to butternut, delicata, acorn, and sweet mama squash, we'll be offering winter squash from the variety trials we grew in collaboration with the University of Wisconsin and the Seed to Kitchen Collaborative.
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There are a few different varieties of winter squash in the UW trials, but all are a type of kabocha squash with drier flesh. They are great for baking and serving mashed with butter and salt (and a little maple syrup or honey if you have a sweet tooth like me!) They would also work well as a substitution for pumpkin in pie or other baked goods. Farmer Alex made a pumpkin roll out of them that turned out great - a fun holiday treat for the fall season. All of these varieties will store well on your kitchen counter, so if you don't get to making anything with them for a while, they will do double duty as beautiful autumn decor!
We have participated in trials with the UW for several years now, and the goal is to find varieties that have great flavor and are well adapted to organic production systems. The melons that we grew this summer were UW trials, and through those trials we found a few really promising melon varieties that tasted incredible and grew well here at the farm. If you are signing up for a Summer CSA box for the 2022 season, I hope you like melons - we're excited to grow them on a bigger scale next year!
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That's it from the farm this week - wish us luck on the carrot harvest!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
