Winter squash & garlic

(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 19)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

After a few days of solidly fall weather, summer returned to Oregon this week. We have been enjoying the unexpected warm sunny weather here on the farm.

We’ve continued our efforts to prepare for fall’s real arrival (who knows when that will be) — energized in our tasks by the beautiful weather. We harvested the winter squash and pumpkins this week, which ended up taking the better half of three days. Although it took awhile, we were incredibly pleased with the harvest and our ability to handle it. The squash look great — they’re beautifully mature and ripe with no signs of sun scald (a problem we had last year that led to premature spoilage). We were especially pleased that our squash were mature because this is the coldest summer for us yet and we tried direct seeding our squash for the first time. Since we put the seeds directly in the rows rather than transplanting starts from the greenhouse, we had to wait until the ground was warm to sow — in this case, May 26.

We were a little apprehensive about how far back that would set us, but we really wanted to try this approach. We had a gut feeling that direct seeded squash would be healthy and more vigorous, and they were! By the time we removed the row cover and weeded in late June, the plants were more lush and green than we had ever seen. We think that having healthier plants delayed leaf die-off, directly contributing to the absence of sun scald this year.

Also, we tried a different approach to handling and storage with good success so far. We put all the squash immediately downstairs, into the insulated, dry storage area below our house. We’ve set up fans and will soon purchase a dehumidifier, to keep the area as dry as possible. In contrast, last year we temporarily stored all our winter squash in our failing temporary greenhouse, which was exposed to huge temperature fluctuations and outdoor moisture levels. Not surprising then, that our squash’s quality quickly deteriorated. Eventually, that greenhouse actually fell down overnight in the December 2007 windstorm — with our squash still ‘inside’ it, which then was rained upon before the morning. It’s amazing how being better prepared to store the squash makes us feel a hundred years ahead of the game this fall.

Anyhow, as you can imagine from the harvest time, we have a lot of squash. Probably more squash than we need, but we’re hoping to successfully store later into the year so that we can enjoy it in February as well as the fall. Since we do have so much, we decided to begin sharing it with you this week, beginning with everyone’s favorite: ‘Delicata’ squash! See the ‘Meet your vegetables’ for more info about this great winter squash.

We also grew this year: pie pumpkins, butternut, and a red buttercup type pumpkin called ‘Ambercup.’ We also have a few very large heirloom squash and pumpkins that we’ll be selling at the last farmers markets (each weigh 5 – 25 lbs!).

I don’t know about you all, but we are very excited about the return of winter squash to our diet. There’s just nothing else like it: sweet, rich, creamy, and oh so delicious!

And speaking of delicious, today (Monday) we took on another big important fall task and planted out next year’s garlic crop! We ‘cracked’ the garlic bulbs we saved for seed this weekend, to separate out the cloves. Each individual clove we plant will become a new head of garlic next year. This is the second year we’ve saved our own garlic to plant. When we harvested our garlic this July, we saw a clear increase in the quality, size, and uniformity of the heads over last year (when we bought seed from another farmer in the area, which was just eating garlic and hadn’t been ‘selected’). Since we always save our ‘best’ garlic heads for seed, we hope to continue seeing improvement each year.

As with all our crops, we plant the garlic in a new part of our field every year — the big picture term for moving plantings is called ‘crop rotation,’ and it’s a practice mandated by the National Organic Program standards. We practice a larger sense of crop rotation too, in that we actually grow on a completely different field each growing year — letting one field ‘fallow’ every other year. The year off from vegetable production provides time for any soil-based diseases to dissipate, for us to hopefully eliminate some weeds, and to increase the soil organic matter and fertility.

We’re particularly conscious of the importance of crop rotation in the case of our garlic, since this year we had a pretty bad looking case of garlic rust on the leaves. Rust is a fungal infection that is caused by fungal spores, but like any disease it requires particular conditions to flourish (decreased air flow and dampness). After considering the entire situation, we’re pretty sure the garlic were either directly infected by and or at least compromised by the presence of weeds in the patch, particularly oats leftover from our cover crop. The rust was on the oats as well as the garlic leaves, and we’ve seen it present on oat leaves elsewhere in our fields. The cold June may also have exacerbated the problem this year.

Anyhow, we saved our seed in spite of the disease presence, and we hope that a different set of conditions might lead to a different outcome. The soil is very well prepped (in contrast to last year’s ground, which was crudely prepped amidst rain, rain, and more rain), and relatively weed seed free (compared to last year’s ground). We’ve also turned all our vegetable bed rows to face east west (as opposed to north south), in order to better make use of the prevailing westerly winter winds to dry out foliage during the rainy season.

And, just in case you’re curious about what planting garlic actually looks like, it’s surprisingly simple: you simply take an individual clove (no need to peel) and push it into prepped ground about an inch or two. You want to make sure the pointy part of the clove is up so that the roots can grow straight down and the leaves can grow straight up without having to curve around each other. (The farmer we trained with told us a story about how one year his crew planted every clove upside down and he and his daughter had to go out and turn thousands of cloves right side up.) Repeat 5200 times and our garlic is planted!

Once the garlic is all cracked and the cloves are counted, planting is not difficult work, but there’s a lot of bending. This year we used our Drängen crawler machine to speed up the planting, which saved us a lot of crouching at the ground pushing in seed. To put it all into perspective, however, we’ve been watching another local farm plant garlic seed on an enormous field nearby (100+ acres?), and they were doing it exactly the same way we do — by hand, slowly. Except with dozens of people. It looked crazy!

I must say — it’s always a bit surreal to be planting the garlic for next year when we’re just now starting to eat this year’s garlic. I’m always amazed at how much we plan ahead out here — much more than I ever would have believed before we starting actually farming vegetables.

Anyhow, that’s a lot of information about winter squash and garlic. Obviously we give these two crops (as well as others) much consideration. I suppose that as a year-round CSA, we feel like mastering certain winter crops is crucial to our success. (Not to imply that summer crops are ‘easy’ to grow, but there are usually more opportunities to re-try those crops within each summer season. Winter crops are a one-shot deal each year.)

We hope that everyone enjoys this week’s beautiful late September share. We love this month — when summer fruits co-exist on our table with fall vegetables. A truly delicious, abundant season. Enjoy the vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

P.S. If you didn’t get last week’s newsletter with the information about 2009’s CSA season, check in with us or look on the blog! It’s time to sign up!

P.P.S. Next week is our last week of the 2008 Main summer season! Some of you will be leaving us for the year, and the rest will continue to pick-up during the upcoming 10 week Late Season. For the Late Season, we will be moving the pick-up indoors, to the YCAP Food Bank warehouse. Please use the loading dock entrance, which is on just a few blocks east on 1st Street from our current pick-up location, past the railroad tracks from the post office exit. We’ll have our sandwich board sign on the sidewalk to help you find the entrance. Our first pick-up at YCAP will be in two weeks, on October 14. The pick-up day and time will remain Tuesdays 3:30 – 6:30. A huge thanks to YCAP for letting us use their warehouse!!!!!!!