Bernadette with a bunch of salad turnips
This week's offering: New this week are poblano peppers, delicata squash, russet potatoes, and the hakurei turnips like in the picture above, though you will be getting them without the tops. Back for the fall are more arugula, celery, leeks, and more spinach. Since we didn't get a freeze yet, lots of peppers, and eggplant are still hanging, and maturing, on their respective plants. Also some organic apples available -- on our way to visiting daughter Esther at Hope College in Michigan, we passed Aaron Molter's orchard (Molter Family Orchards), where they grow some organic apples. Excellent!
Cherry tomatoes just about done; here Peter is picking the last of them about 11' off of the ground:
Coming soon: More sweet potatoes, radishes, gold potatoes.
On the farm: It's a little tricky to decide what is most important to do at this time of year -- while the weekly harvests and packing and delivering take the most of our time, we also need to harvest the entire carrot, beets, potatoes, and sweet potato crops (which we then will store for the winter), all of which can be difficult or impossible to dig if we get a fair amount of rainfall, and then because of the cooler temperatures the soil simply does not dry out enough for our tractor to dig through the soil. So any day that the soil is dry enough to dig any of those crops, we like to keep the harvesting going, especially if the ground is not yet frozen.Then there is the planting of the cover crops, which should ideally get established immediately after harvesting the crops so that they can get established before the winter sets in, and is also dependent on dry enough soil to drag our implements through the fields, and also we need to get the field ready (spreading compost primarily) for our garlic crop, which gets planted in late October and November, again dependent on dry soil to drive the tractors through the field. And trying to maintain our buildings! (See picture below; our barn leaks during heavy storms, and we need to fix before it's too cold for the roofing tar to cure! Thanks to Josh!) Today we harvested lots for this week's deliveries, and washed potatoes, and unfortunately the newsletter, and the necessary field walk to estimate the expected yields of other crops to be included in Harvie's algorithm, got pushed back till late in the day, and hence this note coming later than desired. Many apologies! But some nice crops coming your way!
Have a good week!
Peter & Bernadette and Crew
