It's pickup time for week #16! Don't forget to hop on over to your pick up location to grab your vegetable box for the week. As advertised, we do have some more melons ready for market tomorrow. We'd love to get some of them into the hands of our CSA members, so if you'd like to reserve a melon to pick up along with your share this week, send us an email and we'll try to make that happen (it'll be an additional $3-5 dollars depending on size). Email info@hootowlfarm.net. We do have a limited amount, so once they're gone...they're gone. Be sure to email your request asap because if we don't get it in time, we'll sell any remaining melons to our market customers. Since we are pleased with the melons this year, we'll try to grow them in earnest next year, and will try to have enough to be putting them into our boxes legitimately!
Well, we were successful in finding a curing space for our winter squash, and we were successful in getting a bit of them harvested, but we've still got a lot to move into that space. We'll be bringing our first sampling of our winter squash varieties to market tomorrow and we'll be putting them into our harvest estimate for week #17. We have several types of winter squash this year: Red Kuri (a bright red Hubbard type, excellent in soups!), Spaghetti Squash (delicious and self explanatory!), Kabocha (a nice green/blue variety with an orange interior, sweet and delicious!), Delicata (one of our favorites, as we love that you can eat the entire squash skin and all), and an Acorn variety called Starry Night (very cool looking squash with mottled skin).
We've been planting our last successions of several crops lately. The later into the summer and early fall that planting occurs, the lower the likelihood that the crop will have time to mature before cold temperatures and lack of light shut down growth. We've learned some hard lessons over the years, and hopefully this season our fruitless fall plantings will be at a minimum! We transplanted our last batch of beets this week, and have just about wrapped up direct seeding in the field. We may still have time for another couple of quick rotation crops like arugula and radish (only take about a month!). Otherwise, we'll be focusing our attention on our covered spaces. That means we need to get ruthless and start kicking out some summer crops to make way for more cold hardy crops in the hoop houses. It's always a tough call on when to tear our a carefully tended bed of tomatoes or cucumbers, but we've learned that it really is in our best interest to get the next crop well established rather than to limp along a fading summer crop that is on the decline anyway. So first up on the chopping block will be a couple of rows of cucumbers and basil. Not to worry, we'll have at least another week of basil before that!
Remember that next week is the Harvest Festival! This year it is a combined affair with the Farmers Market on Thursday, but there will be an expanded market with more vendors, some music and decorations, more food and drinks, and the ever delicious Harvest Meal. The Harvest Meal will be 'take-home' this year, but it is still artfully crafted by the Gracious Table with locally grown, raised, and produced ingredients. We plan to have help at our market tent for that week as it could be a bit busier than usual - we'll see!
Have a great week, and we look forward to seeing you all at pickup!
Cheers, Bonnie & Rudy
