Fall on the Farm

(CSA Newsletter: Summer Week 15)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

When the rain began a few weeks ago, we thought maybe it was just one early fall storm. ‘We’ll still have some summery weather before fall really sets in,’ we said. ‘We’ll have a dry spell long enough to work the ground again.’

It’s not surprising that we thought that way, considering the beautiful Indian summer we enjoyed last year, when summer just kept on chugging with few lapses until November 1. But, as we all know by now, we were apparently naïve in our assumptions. Although we’ve had a day or two without rain, the wetness has continued until now, and the weather page shows no breaks in our future. As we get closer and closer to November, we’re realizing that this might just be it for the year: fall is here to stay.

What does that mean for us on the farm? As I mentioned last week, the rain has forced us to rest more. That trend continued, and we’ve enjoyed the calmer pace as we hosted two friends on each of the past two weekends. We loved having time to visit, play scrabble, ride bikes around the island, and cook good meals for our friends.

Despite our desire to just enjoy the excuse to be inside, our list of fall activities wasn’t entirely completed. So this week we’ve refocused our attention on fitting our final tasks into the few dry hours of each day. We took advantage of last Friday’s beautiful dry sunny weather to completely clean out our shed, which involved removing every single item from the shed, sorting through them, and then putting them back. We also added our firewood to the content list at the same time, so now we can build fires without reaching under a tarp.

But the big task nagging at us was our still-to-be-planted over-wintering onions and garlic. We had hoped the ground would dry enough to till and mark beds, which is our usual soil prep method. No such luck so far, and as more and more rain falls, dry soil seems like less and less of a possibility. Fortunately, our ground is well drained, so even with moisture, we found we had some options.

Casey experimented this weekend with working up beds with the hilling discs on our cultivating tractor. Rather than turning and chopping the soil, the discs simply lifted, lightened and shaped the soil into long straight raised beds. While they certainly weren’t what we originally pictured, these single row beds gave us the opportunity to plant our onions and garlic. In fact, we’re enjoying the new planting strategy of only having one row per bed (rather than three) — the plantings take up more room overall, but we’re looking forward to an easier garlic harvest with less compacted soil. I think there’s a saying about such innovations … ‘Necessity is the mother …’

This week’s exciting event will be our final McMinnville Farmers Market on Thursday. It’s been a great market season, but we are looking forward to adding another day and half of open time to our schedule. That list of fall tasks still has many items on it, and we find ourselves still busy most days with harvest. That will change soon enough.

And, more change is upon us all as we wind down the summer season at the end of this month. We have an open house coming up, as well as the arrival of the official fall CSA season. Make sure you check out the ‘reminders/announcements’ in this weeks’ newsletter.

We hope that you all have enjoyed the rain and the few sunny afternoons. And enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers,

Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics

New location for November!
We only have three more weeks of the summer share to be picked up at the First Baptist parking lot. Although the parking lot has been a fabulous location for our summer meeting site, those of you who happened to come by during the torrential downpour last Tuesday will at least understand why we’re headed inside for fall and winter. Just recently, the inside site has come back up for reconsideration, as we try to find the absolute best place for us to meet. We’ll announce the final decision next week (and again for the following two weeks), but we wanted to remind you early on to prepare for a switch to a drier, warmer location the first week of November.

Open house!
The pumpkins are growing! And, hopefully they’ll orange up in time for our final CSA Open House of the season: Sunday, October 28 from 1 to 4 pm. Hope you can make it!

Oakhill Organics tote bags!
After working through several boxes of plastic grocery bags this summer at market and the CSA pick-up site, we decided we needed to help people reduce their plastic use. To that end, we redesigned our ‘I eat local vegetables’ bumper sticker and had it printed on high quality, heavy-duty, shopping bag-sized canvas tote bags. We’re selling them slightly below our cost: $5 each. Our hope is that having a special Oakhill Organics tote bag will help more people remember to bring a re-usable bag to the pick-up site (and remember that Tuesday is vegetable day!). Plus, in our house, we find that we can never have enough tote bags — we have one for taking snacks to market, one for library books, one for shopping at Harvest Fresh … Anyhow, if you’d like to add an Oakhill Organics tote bag to your collection, you can purchase one (or more) at the pick-up site. (We’ll continue to have plastic bags available as well for those inevitable forgetful moments we all have.)