Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Brussels sprouts — A sure sign of fall! These will keep getting sweeter as the weather gets colder, but we like to start eating them about now since they rarely make it through the hardest cold snaps. They live in that balance point between fall’s turning and winter’s darkest moments. Enjoy them!
- Broccoli
- Salad mix
- Red peppers
- Green peppers
- Carrots
- Pie pumpkin — We heard someone talking about pumpkin pie on the radio yesterday lamenting that canned pumpkin has little flavor. His solution? To bake the canned filling to concentrate the flavor! We have a better idea: bake with real pumpkins! It’s easy. If you know you want to bake a pie or pumpkin bread (or make soup, etc.), simply pop a whole or halved pumpkin (cut side down) on a sheet pan and bake until cooked through. Once it is cooled, it is easy to scoop out the seed cavity and peel the flesh away from the skin. Mash or puree the flesh and use it in any recipe in place of canned pumpkin or squash!
- Potatoes
- Yellow onions
Well, here I am: sitting on the couch, with a cooing baby by my side and the first fire of the year burning brightly in the woodstove (I had to clear a summer’s worth of stuff from the area first — the childproof guard gate makes such a great clothes rack!).
I can hear the dripping rain on the porch roof, and when I look out our big picture window, I see the five acres that Casey disked and sowed to various grains last Thursday. They haven’t germinated yet, so it’s just a big open expanse of worked ground, something I haven’t seen in these parts for a while.
We won’t be working these “home” fields as hard from here on out. Now that we have 85+ other acres next door, we’re going to give this twelve acres a break, although in the upcoming year we will grow some grains and a probably a few spring crops on the highest ground. I already miss having our entire farm right outside my window and door.
It’s a bigger outing now to go “quickly” harvest some broccoli for dinner or even just to visit the vegetable crops. I have to pack a little diaper bag with a snack and water (just in case!) and somehow cajole Rusty into the “long” trek. Admittedly, it is almost a mile to parts of our new fields, so that’s quite an adventure for a little boy!
Casey, Rusty and Dottie went over to pick a sweet pepper this weekend while I worked on the never-ending project of purging, sorting and putting away baby/kid things. They made it over there fine, but then I got a call asking me to come pick Rusty up in the car, because he was definitely “done.” Lunchtime was approaching, and when he took off his socks later, I saw that he had the red start of a blister on his heel from riding his bike that far. So, yes, we will still make it to visit the veggies, orchards and animals, but never again with the ease of walking out our door into our extended yard.
That being said, we are filled with excitement about the expansion and new land right now. We made more use of the new land than we expected to this year, which makes us very happy we chose to drop our certification and allow us free reign to do so (if you don’t remember that decision, you can read about it on our website). We grew several acres of vegetables, as well as relatively large trial grain plots, and tons and tons of oats and clover (both for grazing and human eating).
Now that the rain has started, we’re running into other farmers when we make trips into town. We saw two farmers in one outing this weekend! One of them asked us about managing one hundred acres: “Are you farming all of it?”
Well, yes. We are farming one hundred acres. Not all of it is in vegetables, by any means, but our hands, feet and machinery touch all of it at some point. We make decisions about all of it; we worry about all of it; we pay for all of it.
Farming this much ground this year has been overwhelming at many points, but it has also been an enormous blessing.
We loved being able to spread out and give everything plenty of room — the animals and the vegetable crops alike. After many years of talking about it, we went to single row plantings of every vegetable, increasing the space, sunlight, and water available to each plant (as well as making cultivating, weeding, and harvesting easier).
Overall, our farm looked a little out of control at many points this summer — at least in spots — because we’re still scaling up our labor and management techniques to match the acreage. We have definitely had better weeded fields before, but out of that chaos has come amazing abundance and beautiful vegetables. Clearly, the ground next door is wonderful, and we feel incredibly privileged to grow on it.
So, although we will miss the tidiness and ease of farming just the twelve-acre home field, we are moving on with optimism. We also know that these fields could use a break. Even though we fallowed each of these home fields every other year, we’ve still seen signs of over-use — imbalance in the fertility, signs of growing disease pressure (especially in our cole crops), etc. Veggies will end up here again, but never all at once.
Which inspires me to do something new: garden! Rusty and I tried to have a home garden this year, just in front of the house, so that we could pick flowers and some of our favorite veggies without a big trek. But I underestimated the challenge of weeding and tending a garden while big and pregnant with a toddler in tow. So, by mid-summer I abandoned it to the weeds — alas. We will try again next year, because I at least want to have cooking greens and flowers at easy reach.
But now is the time to retreat from these things — daylight is waning and we are using all of it to bring in harvests and begin the cold weather work of projects. We have many to do before the start of the Full Diet CSA next January.
This is, of course, also the season to rest, and both Casey and I can already feel our bodies relaxing in spite of the continued work and other pressures. It’s amazing how the shift in weather can bring immediate visceral changes.
At the end of the summer, the dryness, dust and heat have just built up tension — exacerbated by the feeling of needing to do-as-much-as-possible-before-the-rain-comes. And, then, once the rain does arrive, bringing with it moist clean air, cool temperatures, and gray skies, that tension just naturally begins to unknot and without much awareness on our part we begin to feel sleepier and move a little slower.
And, so Sunday evening, I started a new knitting project, and Casey read a Wendell Berry book while Dottie napped on his chest, and Rusty made up songs about dinosaurs while playing with some stickers. These are the moments that make all of the work of farming and parenting worth it. We do love our work, but we also love the cycles of rest that come too. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Pumpkin Patch CSA Open House
This Sunday, October 28, noon – 2 pm
Bring a sack lunch and join us on the farm this Sunday for our pumpkin patch open house! The pumpkins look amazing. Also, you can help us process our sorghum syrup and participate in a winter squash tasting! And one of our employees who is also a DJ will supply some fun tunes! We’ll gather at the big shed on the new land …
Directions: Take HWY-18 to the Dayton exit. Drive straight through Dayton and keep heading south on Hwy-221/Wallace Rd for about seven miles. Turn LEFT onto Grand Island Rd (you’ll see signs for Heiser’s Pumpkin Patch) and drive over the big bridge onto the island. Drive through the first four-way intersection. After another very small bridge, take a RIGHT onto an unmarked gravel road (we’ll put out some balloons or other marker). Drive to the end of the road! Please be aware that at the very end, the road does become rutted and muddy.
