Where’s the frost?
Farmers like to complain. We were familiar with this stereotype before we pursued the occupation, but we’re surprised and a little embarrassed by how easy it was to find this behavior manifest and become a recognizable pattern on our farm. It’s hard to remark on how well things are going while they’re going well. Struggle just seems to be more interesting.
From time to time, we’ve recognized a trickiness in balancing the need to be transparent, disclosing our difficulties and failures to our shareholders while simultaneously expressing our gratefulness for the opportunity. We hope to be clear that our email campaigns are motivated by transparency, not an appeal for sympathy. It’s a privilege to have the support and opportunity to figure this out and it’s part of the value of a CSA membership to be brought along for the ride.
This week’s complaint sure is weird: Where’s the frost? There was a moment early last week when our crops were making it clear that they’d had enough of this strange hot & dry early Autumn. While our fall garden crops didn’t seem as rigid as they ought to be, our remaining Peppers and Okra were still thriving out in the summer blocks. We’re told to expect the unexpected as, on account of the changing climate, Ohio gradually becomes the new Tennessee.
It’s nearly Sweet Potato season. We’ve been keeping an eye on our rows, the plan being to harvest as soon as we get our first light frost. Our starter plants arrived late this year, so we needed to give them as much time in the ground as possible to grow into useful fat roots.
When we grew standard potatoes in the spring, we discussed the difference between “new,” uncured potatoes verses the traditional preserved grocery store potato. We assumed we could treat our Sweets the same way but failed to recognize the unique value the curing process has in bringing maximum sweetness to the Sweet Potatoes and Yams. Having learned this, we pulled our first row yesterday, collecting a wheelbarrow-full in order to give them a couple weeks to settle.
Sufficed to say, hand-digging a 100’ row of sweet potatoes is hard work! We move down the row one foot at a time, popping up the soil with a fork and digging out the big roots, leaving the little ones for the worms.
When we got to the fifth or sixth foot of our march, we noticed a little fur ball snuggled tightly next to a bunch of roots. It was a nursing mother vole and her litter. We were able to move the family to a safer location within the cover crops.
It led us to consider what conventional sweet potato harvests must look like. We assume conventional Yam growers sow monoculture fields and reap with heavy machine harvesters. We found a vole family in our 400 square foot row. How many vole families have settled in the hectares of conventional farms and are inevitably caught up in the mass destruction of the harvest?
We’ll be sharing the following fresh veggies with our families this week:
Edible and/or Ornamental Winter Squash (Butternut, Spaghetti, Pumpkin), Peppers, Beets, Carrots, Swiss Chard, Kale or Spinach (as available), Turnips, Bok Choy or Radish (as available), Eggs, and Flowers.
We’ll continue to distribute all the eggs we can gather for you all this week. Our free range birds continue to find creative places to hide their clutches.
We are still moving our mobile coops every day with one covering old sheep pasture while another cleans up former cherry tomato beds.
Thank you for participating, we hope you enjoy this week’s produce!
Erin & David