Autumnal Equinox
We have another week upcoming of the freshest, naturally cultivated, homestead surplus veggies you can find! The diet is getting leafier around here, and ain’t upsetting. Root vegetables are back in the mix. This week, we’ll be incorporating beets and continued harvests of spicy, peppery radishes for your salads.
Altogether, you can expect the following whole foods in your share this week:
Butternut Squash, Mild Peppers, Hot Peppers, Beets, Red Okra, Swiss Chard or Spinach (as available), Kale Salad, Radish, Herbs (as available), Eggs, and Flowers.
We have six weeks left in our inaugural CSA season, but the busiest summer of our lives will technically come to a close this week. We’ve accumulated a whole lot of data and experience on which to reflect. Thanks again, sincerely, to everybody for supporting this project. We are really looking forward to applying the lessons we’ve learned this year toward future production goals and sustainable stewardship. For those interested, we will keep you informed about our plans for 2022.
We no longer have much of a tomato supply, but peppers are continuing to produce and ripen. We’ve remarked before that we aren’t oblivious to the fact that we have planted a few too many hot pepper plants and we realize it can be more than some folks can reasonably incorporate into their meal plans. We’ve started dicing our hot peppers into tiny bits and freezing them for winter. This is an easy way to get your surplus preserved without working too hard and it’ll give you peace of mind if you’re concerned about utilizing your supply.
We’ve got some tasty, flavorful leafy greens ready this week. We’ll harvest Spinach and Swiss Chard as they’re available and appropriately mature. A baby Kale salad mix, ideal for raw preparations, will also be included this week. Cooler temperatures are upcoming, which ought to be preferable for our established, broadleaf kale beds- preferable leaves for the skillet or the blender for smoothies.
Spaghetti squash is ripe out in the field, but we’ll continue to distribute our Butternuts this week. We’ve definitely pulled our biggest ones already but there are plenty more to be collected. We’ve seen a few watermelons out there, but they’re not quite ripe and disappointingly small- softball sized maybe (more lessons learned). We’ve unfortunately had to lower our expectations in this department. If we miraculously find enough of these babies, we’ll be sure to distribute them, but our hopes aren’t up.
Broccoli is established and growing in the fall garden, as well as Kohlrabi and Bok Choy. With temperatures cooling in the next couple weeks, we should see significant progress. There’s a healthy succession of beets planted out there, with our first being harvested this week. We even pulled a few carrots for a salad this week and while they’re still babies, it won’t be long until you’ll see some in your fall shares.
We’ll have an ongoing meat harvest through the fall as well. We appreciate everyone who has expressed interest in purchasing whole shares and those who have already claimed one. If you’re interested in a whole share for your freezer, let us know, as we’ll soon be opening up our availability publicly. Thus far, we’ve only been offering our harvests to CSA shareholders and family.
Have a great week, friends. It is officially the autumnal equinox. Thanks for making this a summer one we won’t soon forget, full of lessons and experiences we’ll never take for granted.
Erin & David
