This is the second-to-last summer share for weekly members, and the final share for some every-other-week members. To verify your delivery schedule, log in to your Harvie profile page and look on the left side of the page. You will see your current and future deliveries listed as you scroll down. Given that, we have some housekeeping notes:
- If you have brought home any share containers, please be sure to bring them with you when you pick up your share this week and leave them at your pickup location for us to collect. For home delivery members, just an extra reminder to leave your prior week's share container out for Sarah to pick up.
- If you put a hold on a share earlier in the season and have not yet rescheduled it, please do so right away. You won't be able to reschedule a held box past the last week of the summer season.
- If you have extras credits available and do not plan to sign up for a Winter Share, you'll want to use them before the end of the summer season. They expire after March 1st, 2021.
- We will take one week off from share deliveries the week of October 19th before starting the Winter Share deliveries November 4-5. Now's the time to sign up if you haven't already. We did add two new St. Paul pickups in the last week or so: one in Mac-Groveland (limited spots available) and one in East Midway. You will see these pickups as options at signup. We are hoping to finalize another Minneapolis pickup early next week.
- We are delivering a one-time Thanksgiving Share the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The focus for this share will be larger quantities of Thanksgiving staples like sweet potatoes, potatoes, squash, garlic, and carrots. Weather depending, we may have spinach or lettuce in that box, as well. It will be customizable like usual. You can sign up for that delivery on our normal signup page.
Wondering what's going on in the featured image for this week's newsletter? Anneli and I were scouting lettuce grown in what looks like a pretty strange environment, right. We put our fall lettuce and salad mix successions into a field with experimental living pathways, designed to suppress weeds, reduce soil erosion, and build organic matter in our soils. We had to cover the field with row cover in an attempt to keep deer from eating the lettuce, so we didn't mow the pathways as originally planned. Despite it's tall neighbors, the lettuce is growing very nicely!
Farm News
Our small crew has been hustling to continue to work on early fall tasks outside of our weekly CSA harvest and wash activities. We got the rest of the summer crops removed from the high tunnels and the next wave of winter greens crops transplanted - spinach and a second succession of salad mix. These will do most of their growing over the next 5-6 weeks before slowing down as days get shorter and nights get colder. Think fresh spinach and salad mix in December and January!
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We also got a good start on storage crop harvest. The rest of our potatoes are now out of the ground and in storage, and sweet potatoes are harvested and curing at around 85° and 85% humidity for a week. The curing process heals scuffs and wounds incurred during harvest, and induces a chemical conversion from starch to sugar within the tubers (yes, they get sweeter during this process).
Sweet potato harvest is more involved than many other root crop harvests because of the prep work that needs to be done before they can be dug. The vines need to be removed from the main stem by hand with a knife to allow us to remove plastic mulch from the beds. (Plastic mulch is a necessary tool to allow us to grow this long-season, heat-loving southern crop in the North.) Then the plastic mulch is removed from the bed without damaging the tubers, before we are finally able to dig them up.
We knew going into this harvest that the crop was going to be shy of our usual yield because of season-long herbivory by deer and late defoliation from hail. One of our two sweet potato fields was unsurprisingly a near total loss after having been grazed by a family of deer for six straight weeks after planting. The second field faced deer feeding damage for about two weeks, before they moved on and left it alone. That field yielded 95% of our crop this season. We will be supplementing our crops of both sweet potatoes and regular potatoes with produce from our friends at Driftless Organics to ensure we have plenty of these available for winter shares.
That's a good segue to the latest development in big-picture projects at the farm. After years of attempts to keep deer out of our crops using various types of electric fencing and protective covers, we have reached the inescapable conclusion that we must construct a deer fence. This means a 10-ft woven wire mesh fence secured to treated posts running the perimeter of our production fields, over a mile in length. It's a big expense, but we lost at least $10,000 worth of vegetable crops to deer damage this year alone, so it just has to be done. We hope to start construction by the end of the month.
Notes on items in this week's shares:
- Butternut squash may have some hail pocks this week. We are using up the last of the bin we sorted out at harvest as having hail damage, so there should be less of that in future weeks. Eating quality still great, just peel extra or pare out the affected spots.
- We're excited to harvest this season's first cabbage, a variety called Capture with produces semi-flattened heads when grown in northern latitudes. It is fairly resistant to one of our most difficult-to-manage plant diseases, and the heads are looking good despite disease-affected crops nearby. With beets also in this week's box, it could be a good week for borscht! Or try these roasted cabbage steaks that put cabbage front and center.
- Purple top turnips are a staple ingredient in our winter soups, but we also enjoy simply roasting them. Try an Asian twist by adapting this miso-roasted turnip recipe - it calls for Japanese/salad turnips, but can be made using larger storage turnips, as well. Turnips will keep for several weeks in a plastic bag in your fridge.
- Salad radishes this week will be coming from a new planting - they are mellow, creamy, and even a bit sweet. I snacked on four of them as I scouted the crop during field walk. There is some light frost damage to the tender greens.
- Arugula is similarly tender and mild-flavored from a new succession, a great candidate for a fresh salad with goat cheese and candied beets.
- We are excited to be picking spinach, after a longer hiatus than we had planned. This frost-sweetened spinach is tender enough for fresh eating but substantial enough to sauté, if you prefer. Minor disclaimer: this is coming from a field that had some cover crop go to seed last year, and we saw a flush of grasses germinate shortly after we planted the spinach. So what I'm saying is...we are going to do our darndest to keep grass out of the harvest crates, but there's some likelihood you may find a blade or two of grass that sneaks by us.
Have a great week, and thank you all for sticking out this challenging year with us!
Dana
