‘It is what it is’ season

As we begin the final month of our 2022 CSA/farmshare distribution, we’ve officially entered the bitter/sweet “it is what it is” season. With our final harvest less than a month away, the garden, and its potential yield, is what it is. There’s not a lot that can be planted and harvested in less than a month and there’s not a lot left that can be changed or adjusted. It’s a sweet feeling to know that we’re nearing the end of this year’s project with objective successes on which to reflect. It’s a bitter feeling knowing that we can’t go back, correct our past failures, or make current adjustments, that the 2022 crop plan is in the books, that it is indeed what it is.

Thank you again for your support this season. We can’t help but distract ourselves day-dreaming about how to use lessons we’ve learned to build an even more healthy, beautiful, efficient, balanced, productive, well-tuned farm & garden next spring.

This week you should expect the following in your box:

Peppers

As we clear out our summer beds, one thing our shareholders can certainly expect is a great pepper dispersal to end the season. We have sweet Bells and Carmens, Bananas, Anaheims, with both hot & mild Jalapenos. Without any remaining squash or tomatoes, our peppers and okra will be the last summer fruits left to pull. In addition to seasonal ornamental arrangements and eggs, the last few boxes of the season will also yield greens and root vegetables as are available and mature before the middle of October.

Potatoes

We dug out and accumulated the last of our spuds, to be distributed this week. As available, a mix of Yukon Golds, Kennebec white potatoes, and red spuds will be shared. We learned a lot about growing potatoes and made some significant changes to the way we approached the crop. It’s important that we prioritize preparing potato beds early, get the seed treated and planted promptly, give the plants plenty of space, and actively hill, weed, and cultivate the beds throughout the season.

Onion

We have onions in storage that we’ve pulled to distribute this week. There will be yellow and red onions shared as available.

Bok Choy

Bok Choy, along with other cool season brassicas like Arugula, Brussel Sprouts, and Cauliflower, remains firmly in the frustrating category of crops that we have yet to completely wraps our heads around. While most of our farm projects are less intimidating after a few years, a perfect, flawless brassica crop remains a somewhat distant goal post. While it’s no longer an issue about learning what we need to do to be successful, it remains a challenge implementing how to do what we need to do. Next year’s crop plan will focus much more on how to delegate time, labor, and resources rather than basically what it takes to grow a crop at a surplus scale.

Swiss Chard

We continue to prune our row of beautiful, multicolored chard plants to keep them healthy and encourage further production into the cooler season. To use for salads, wraps, or diced and incorporated into other dishes, we’ll include a handful of the rainbow leaves for shareholders this week.

Anaheim Peppers

These are the hot peppers of the week. The heat and flavor profile of these long, polished green peppers can be expected to sit somewhere between a bell/carmen pepper and a jalapeno. Earlier in the season, these peppers surprised us with their intensity but the flavor and heat has seemingly mellowed.

Bell/Carmen Sweet Peppers

These sweet peppers are still reliably crunchy and delicious raw, stuffed, or in the skillet. If you end up with a surplus we suggest slicing, separating the hots and the sweet, and freezing them for use on the skillet year-round.

Banana Peppers

We’ll include a banana or two along with the bells and carmens for a good handful of sweet peppers this week.

Nadapenos

These again are our mild Jalapenos. They have the size, texture, and flavor of traditional Jalapenos without the overwhelming heat. These are great stuffed and/or fried.

Herbs

We still have herbs left in garden, of varying quantities and conditions. We were able to get a decent fresh cilantro share cut for our home delivery folks this week. We’ll cut what we have left for farm pick ups and switch over to other available herbs like rosemary, thyme, parsley or basil as the cilantro is appropriately thinned.

Flowers

As the seasons change and traditional summer flowers are less available, ornamental arrangements become necessarily more creative and improvised. Erin plans to switch to fall wreaths for the last week or two once we reach October.

Eggs

We think we’ll have a full dozen eggs for our home delivery shareholders next week. We continue to reliably distribute half dozens unless/until our inventory allows for a greater allotment. Thanks for your patience.

We’re sorry about the delayed emails and really hope to get back to Wednesday email updates next week if time allows for us to readjust.

Thank you and have a great week!

Erin & David