Hello Folks! It's your weekly reminder to swing by your pick up location to grab your produce box this week! If this is your last week and you're not in the habit of religiously reading our farm happenings from your off-weeks...we'd like to take a minute to say THANK YOU! This year was tough one all around for businesses AND individuals; we really appreciate your support any year, but especially this one. We realize that when things get difficult or uncomfortable, it's human nature to simplify and do what feels safe and familiar. While we are trying to make our CSA more streamlined and customizable, it's still not the easiest way to get food and it's even a brand new concept to some. So your choice to participate in our CSA THIS year says a lot about your commitment to improving our local food system, to supporting local businesses, and perhaps most importantly, that you value fresh, healthy and nutritious food! So thank you so much!
We do still have one more week after this one of the CSA season, the last pick up will be Oct. 1 at the Farmers Market or Oct. 2 on farm. We're not sure yet how our produce outlook will...look in the weeks past that, but there's a good chance that we'll decide to offer some more boxes through the Farm Stand program. So keep an eye on your inbox if you think you'll be missing your regular dosage of Hoot Owl Farm produce!
We're trying to finish out the market season strong, and we're looking pretty good so far. The final Farmers Market at Libby is on October 8th. We may try to attend a late season market in Troy - the annual Fall Bounty Market, sometime in mid-October. This week has been a real resurgence for some crops that were damaged by the freeze that we experienced, but weren't done it totally. Our dahlias have started flowering again, and we are actually increasing our harvest of patty pan summer squash. We only covered the patty pan squash (not zucchinis), and the difference is striking. While all of our summer squash seemed to suffer about the same amount of damage from the cold temps, the patty pan has been much more successful in snapping back. So while it's officially FALL, some of our summer crops don't seem to know it yet and we don't quite have the heart to tell them, lol!
A lot of folks are getting spaghetti squash in their boxes this week, as a reminder, one of our favorite ways to eat this storage crop is Spaghetti Squash Pizza Bowls - the smaller (personal sized) squashes are especially suited to this! We're happy to say that even our delicata winter squash is coming along and beginning to ripen in the field, so we will be able to include more of that in our harvest estimate for next week along with all of our other winter squashes.
We have just a couple more beds of lettuce, romaine, and scallions to plant and then THAT'S IT!! Well, to be accurate, we will still be seeding our microgreens for a while longer, but the end of active planting season is a major change for us. It will be good to give that portion of our brains that is always on high alert for changing conditions in the nursery a break, that way it will be recharged for next season. We'll be trading in the time saved with no more planting to be cleaning up beds and doing what preparation we can before putting them 'to bed' for the winter.
We look forward to seeing you at pick up this week!
Cheers, Rudy & Bonnie
PS. The pic above is the season record for GIANT beet! It actually grew as a volunteer in the carrots and every time someone went near while harvesting, Rudy yelled over to make sure that his big beet was safe from being pulled. Definitely a little big for the optimum beet, but it's just right for a biggest beet of the year trophy!
