Farm Notes is online! Communities and families and businesses and countries all have rituals and traditions, routines and systems--that’s what helps to form our identity as a group and what helps us to get the work done without making up new methods each time. Our farm has many work-related rituals and just as many food-related traditions and a satisfying number of annual events that mark the turning of the seasons. Here we describe some of the rituals that help to define our farm.
Thank you to all of you who returned bags last week! We truly appreciate it--we got to the point where we had to pack deliveries in plastic bags! Please keep them coming, or please make a note for yourself to return your stockpile if you have not already.
Even though we haven't had our first frost yet, the fields are getting put to bed for the winter. The cover crop needs time to get established so that it can stay healthy all winter. In Vienna we have to get it to grow big enough so the geese can't quite chew it all the way to the ground in February. The taller the blades of barley, the less yummy they are to the geese. In Loudoun we have a big field of tillage radishes that is growing fast--we hope that the winter will be cold enough to kill those radish plants so we can plant the first carrots and beets without tilling them under. The radish leaves will be like a mulch, covering the soil.
In Loudoun, we are picking in a giant brassica patch and we are digging in a big carrot field and we are scrounging around in the peppers and eggplant for the last time. All the other fields are filled with green, growing barley and winter peas. It looks like Ireland.
We are trying to finish sorting all the sweet potatoes that have been curing in the greenhouse. It is a monumental task--it took us a month to dig all those sweet potatoes and by the end we had about 15 tons. Now we have to sort them by size and quality and stash them for the long winter.
After this week we have only two more weeks of CSA and markets and then we can take a good long break. October was the most beautiful October in memory, with warm days and blue skies. Work was so easy. We have enjoyed this autumn immensely.
