We're feeling the pivot to fall, in both the weather and crop growth. Tomatoes are starting to decline, which happens naturally in September given the age of the plantings, but also hastened by this cool weather. We will still be harvesting cherry, slicer, and heirloom tomatoes for the next 2-3 weeks, but they'll be less abundant in shares. We are seeing one last hurrah of watermelons, though! While the vines in both our fields were killed by the hail and the disease spread that ensued, I was surprised and please to find that the fruits had held up, quality-wise. In addition to most of the hail dents healing over, we found fruits that are 1/2 the "normal" size for this variety also ripened up nicely. Usually I just walk past the 6-8 lb fruits, but we cut open 8-10 of them, and every one was delicious. These are a nicer size for CSA anyway, so we're offering them again this week. I know many people only reach for watermelon when it's hot out, but I promise, they are still a tasty dessert during a cool September week :)
The two big bulk harvests on the horizon are winter squash and potato harvest. The squash was hit pretty hard by hail, but walking through the field, there seems to be a good amount that's salvageable. We will be separating two classes of fruits when we harvest - those with "hail dents" that have healed over, and those that were mostly missed by hail. We will be prioritizing putting the hail damaged squash in shares over the next two months, as these will likely not have nearly the storage life as the unaffected fruits. We cooked up a couple butternuts this week, and they were delicious! Which actually surprised me, since butternuts usually benefit from ~2 weeks of curing in storage after harvest. In the squash lineup this year are butternut, delicata, sweet dumpling, acorn, buttercup, kabocha, and red kuri.
It will be fun to see what kind of potato crop lies under ground. We took the last two years off from growing potatoes, because frankly, we've never been that great at growing them and seed cost is very high. But knowing we were going to offer a Winter Share this year, we planted about a 1/2 acre, mostly gold and a little red. They've all died back now and are ready to be dug; we're just waiting on a day when we have enough folks around to get them out of the field. We did buy a tractor drawn "chain digger" at a farm auction last winter that should make it easy to get them out of the ground, but we'll still need to pick them all up and get them in bins.
Other signs of the changing of seasons - fall seedings of bunching radishes, arugula, and spinach are up and just a couple weeks away from harvest. Storage root plantings of beets, turnips, and watermelon radishes have nicely recovered from hail and should produce good crops. Our storage carrots were already a bit behind before the hail, so they'll need several more weeks of good growing conditions to size up to where we want them.
The upcoming week is a bit nerve-wracking, with some daytime highs in the low 50s, and some nights getting down to 40 degrees. It will slow down growth and ripening of our remaining wholesale peppers, which as you know is an important crop for us that was badly damaged in the hail storm. But the cold will also really slow down our sweet potatoes, which are a long-season crop that need warm fall weather to size up tubers. Given that we already lost about two weeks worth of growth when they were defoliated during the hailstorm, a cold September really hurts the chances of getting full-sized sweet potatoes :-(
Notes on items in this week's shares
- See watermelon notes at beginning of newsletter. Most will have some nicks from hail, but should be no impact on sweet flesh inside. Smaller size than last week.
- Carrots were bulk harvested several weeks ago and have been in cold storage since then. A portion of the carrots are graded as seconds because the tip got cut off during harvest or they're slightly forked. We'll be mixing some of these seconds in with the firsts and discounting the item value in shares. (Most farmers only seconds, for the record. They're just as tasty, just not always as shapely as firsts).
- Beets are topped this week rather than bunched (hail was not kind to greens) and will contain a mixture of red and gold.
- Green and red peppers are again coming from the U of M horticulture lab. This will be their final harvest of the season - we so appreciate their generosity!
- Just a note that cherry tomatoes and mini sweet peppers will be packed in pints this week, instead of quarts like in prior weeks when they were more abundant.
Have a wonderful week!
Dana
