Welcome to Week 1 of the Fall Farm Share!
It's time to customize your share! You have til Tuesday at midnight to do so. Don't forget to return your green bag!
We are very excited to be launching our Fall Farm Share. This is only our second season having a fall share and it feels really good to keep that veggie train chugging! Thanks for coming along. We hope you'll enjoy continuing to eat fresh, local food as the weather turns cold.
On The Farm
We had our first frost on the farm last week, with another couple heading our way this week. That means the end of our peppers and eggplants. It's hard to say goodbye to fresh peppers every week, but I also appreciate shifting to a different mindset to use a new variety of vegetables in my daily meals. We carmelized leeks with bacon for a topping on squash soup, added kale to a creamy pasta, and baked a fish with roasted fennel.
With frost (AND SNOW!) in the forecast, this week we will be covering up veggies in the field with floating row cover to protect some of our more vulnerable crops, like radishes, lettuce, and salad mix, dill and cilantro.
Another major undertaking we (actually Alex and Jonathon) took on last week was beginning to build our new greenhouse! This will allow us to grow peppers, eggplants, and cucumbers inside. Growing these under protection means we can have them earlier, increase yields, and keep them growing for longer. We'll also be able to grow *more* tomatoes. Then, in the fall, we can grow more spinach, salad mix, kale, chard, bok choy, and similar green crops so we can increase our fall share membership!
It was a lot of work, and really muddy, but it's a very exciting progression!
Veggie Highlights
We are very excited to finally have our carrots back. This is a crop we truly struggle with, a combination of our heavy clay soil and weeds. We tilled in our first fall planting of carrots because the weeds overtook it and it wouldn't have been worth the time to weed. So, we had a gap in production. But finally, they are ready to harvest. We experimented with planting some into tilled beds and some into no-till beds, and the results were interesting; the carrots in the tilled beds are smaller and more oddly shaped.
Have you tried watermelon radish before? It is a beautiful addition to salads. Either slice very thinly with a mandolin, or peel off the skin and then slice.
Did you know that kale gets sweeter after a frost? Actually, many vegetables do as they convert their starch to sugars to prevent from freezing!
Pie pumpkins don't seem to hold up for as long as other squashes, so if you're going to add squash to your share I recommend adding those first. We also have acorn, butternut, and kabocha. The kabocha squash is extremely sweet and delicious, I made a soup from it the other day.
We are again providing sweet potatoes from Daryl Myny, an organic grower in Aylmer this year.
We have begun to harvest our fall beets! We were pretty happy about our beets to begin with; prepped the beds, got them planted on time, weeded them on time. However, the fields they are in do not drain well, and the August rains kept the soil far too wet. So, they didn't grow very well. We have some, but not nearly the quantity and size we were aiming for.
Spinach is still growing but should be ready in a week or two! Same with radishes.
We hope you enjoy your veggies!
Please don't hesitate to email at mulberrymoonfarm@gmail.com or text me at 519-719-7253 with any feedback or questions at any time. :)
Your farmer,
Kim
