Harvesting in fall weather

(CSA Newsletter: Late Season Week Eight)

Meet this week’s vegetables:

December has arrived, and we now only have two more weeks left in 2008’s CSA season! Our last pick-up will be on December 16 this year, at which point, Casey and I will begin our six-week vacation from harvesting before starting up again for the CSA on Tuesday, February 3.

Harvesting as we do in fall in winter has caused some people to say we’re ‘crazy,’ ‘gluttons for punishment,’ or just plain ‘weird.’ I’ll admit that it’s true that we’re aberrations. Of course, climate provides us this option, but we’ve also chosen to farm year-round intentionally. Spreading the CSA harvest over 45 weeks allows us to achieve some important goals:

First, we can provide our local community with food for a longer season. We know we love to eat seasonal food year-round, so assume that other ‘local-vores’ would enjoy that opportunity too.

Secondly, spreading out the work allows us to earn more income with just two of us workers. Similarly, it also evens out our workload rather than creating a crazy spike mid-summer.

But you know what the third (and maybe crazy) reason is? We actually like working outside in the fall and winter — just as much as in the summer!

Is that crazy? I don’t think so. Here in Oregon, fall, winter, and spring have great potential. We certainly have our share of cold, rainy weather, but for the most part it’s quite bearable once a person has donned the appropriate clothing and attitude. Only rarely do we find our mood hampered by the cold season weather — whereas in the summer, heat waves can beat us down day after day.

So, what’s it like to harvest right now? Fun! Seriously! More specifically, an average day of harvesting looks a little something like this:

We begin by donning the aforementioned appropriate attitude. How? By making sure we begin each day of work with a very good hearty breakfast: typically cooked greens, eggs and toast.

Next, we don the appropriate clothing: long underwear on top and bottom, wool socks, sturdy pants/overalls, warm shirt, down vest, fleece hooded jacket, rain jacket, rain bib pants, warm hat over hat with brim, gloves, rain boots. Yes, all of those items are put onto one body at one time. It takes awhile to get dressed.

Harvesting now is a little messier than in summer. We kneel in mud (hence rain pants) and often have to literally dig with our hands in the dirt. We store all our root vegetables in the ground all winter and harvest them each week as we need them (as opposed to harvesting in the fall and storing in cold storage). Roots store beautifully this way; however, that also means that we have to harvest each week as we need them. For example, we just harvested potatoes today (Monday) for this week’s share.

Harvesting potatoes is a straightforward task: we kneel and dig into the ground to try and find the many potatoes hiding inside the hills. We scoot along the rows as we go, pulling our bins along with us. When we’re digging in a good bed with lots of potatoes, the process is very satisfying. I think we humans are wired to enjoy ‘finding’ things (it’s probably a forager instinct). Although the ground can become hard and compacted from rainfall this time of year, we are helped in our digging by the roots of weeds (which we can pull out and reveal potatoes underneath) and vole tunnels.

Voles are large mouse-like rodents that live in farm fields and burrow through the ground. The resulting ‘runways’ show up all over our fields, but we find the voles especially love the potato field, where we can conveniently use the tunnels as starting points for digging into the ground. (It does take some courage to stick your hands repeatedly into animal holes, even with gloves on!)

Anyhow, fortunately, our CSA is still small enough (93 shares) that harvesting each individual item takes us an hour or less, so the work rarely becomes tiresome even if the conditions are cold, windy, or rainy. We almost always have some fun harvesting — we talk and sing — even if people driving by probably wonder what it the world we’re doing kneeling in the mud in this kind of weather!

Washing the vegetables can actually be more challenging to our psyches than harvesting, since we feel like we’re done after we bring the bins in — but we’re only halfway there. The vegetables are muddy, so we wash them vigorously before giving them to you. Most items get a soak in a tub with clean water and are then hosed down with more clean water. The process is simple but wet, and we are grateful for our rain gear again and again.

By the end of a harvest day, we’ve usually just about reached our limit of outdoor time and happily return to our house to warm up by the fire, make dinner, write the newsletter, and sleep! The joys of being inside in fall and winter are only accentuated by our time outside. Simple pleasures!

We hope that you too enjoy some simple pleasure this week — perhaps some roasted vegetables will warm your belly at dinner or a fresh arugula salad will spice up your lunch. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!

Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla

2008 season is almost over!

A quick reminder that we only have two more weeks left in this year’s CSA season. The last pick-up will be on Tuesday, December 16.

We will begin pick-up again after our break, starting on Tuesday, February 3 (same time, same place).

If you’ve signed up for 2009, you will receive a ‘CSA handbook’ and invoice in the mail immediately after the first of the year. We’ll be mailing them on December 31, so if you don’t receive it soon after that, please contact us.

Your first 2009 payment will be due by January 20, 2009. More details will be included in the invoice and handbook. (Please do not mail us a check before 2009! Thank you!)

Also, check with us if you’re unsure about 2008 payments. We have a handful of members who still owe money for this year’s CSA. We’d like to have all the remaining payments by the last pick-up, December 16. Thank you!