Hello dear CSA members! My name is Ellen and I manage the direct seed crops here at Featherstone. As I sit at my desk and feel I finally have a minute to breathe, I can attribute it to the final seeding of the year going in on Sunday, and the inch of rain we got Monday night. This may also be the first time I have been happy about any rain this season, as it has not rained for almost thirty days. Thirty days on the farm feels like the blink of an eye and also an eternity, one minute I’m finishing the final carrot seeding, and the next I’m already making plans for prospective harvest dates of said carrots, and can barely recall what happened between here and there.
For me July and August are a rush of final plantings, flame weeding, cultivating, and the days seem to all mold together into one continuous race, usually against time and weather. We’ve started the winter squash harvest, which is one of my favorite jobs of the year. Just imagine clipping thousands of squash and then tossing every single one to another person on a trailer to delicately place in bins. We spend weeks getting all the winter squash in and then quickly move into other fall harvests like beets, turnips, rutabaga, and finally carrots. We are beginning to feel the crisp fall air and evening temperatures are dropping, a sure sign that those famous Featherstone carrots will soon be filling coop shelves and your CSA boxes, too!
Above Photo: Our fall carrot field.
Above Photo: Ellen with a check on our carrots, which we will start to harvest in about 10 days!
And if all this talk of our fall carrots, winter squash and root crop harvests gets you excited, now is the time to sign up for our upcoming winter CSA program, which begins November 6th, with 9 bi-weekly deliveries into March. We hope to have a lot more fresh greens in our winter shares this year, too, with the new addition of our hoop house, where we’ve planted spinach, lettuce, kale, swiss chard and escarole for winter shares! Sign up via your Harvie account here. We do plan to sell out again this year, so please don't delay.
Thank you for choosing to be a member of our CSA and supporting us through the challenges of farming in a changing climate. We couldn’t do it without you.
Ellen Russo
Direct Seed Crop Manager
