(CSA Newsletter: Main Season Week 15)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
Last week’s positive newsletter tone continued through the week, much to our delight. I noted a few weeks ago that once we hit mid-August, we feel like we’re on the downhill slide of the season. Although our workload continues, we feel a little freer. Most things are planted, and our job becomes simply tending and harvesting. We no longer have to worry as much about sowing and planting timing, weather openings, germination rates, etc.
Add our new less stressful irrigation regimen to that seasonal shift, and we felt pretty darn good this week, allowing us to enjoy an exceptionally social series of days. (We love life on the farm, but it can get lonely at times, even with market and the CSA pick-ups. So, we love opportunities to visit with people!)
Last Wednesday evening, interns from another local vegetable farm dropped by to see our operations. We gave them the tour and talked long past dark about what we do and why. We also love conversations with other young aspiring farmers — it’s great to feel like we’re part of a movement rather than just isolated workers out here in the fields.
Thursday night we had other vendors over for dinner after market. We were all a little blurry and slaphappy after working a long day, but we managed to pull together a tasty meal and catch up on market happenings among other things.
Friday night we attended a cheese making class at another local farm, where we learned how to make delicious fresh mozzarella cheese, which we then enjoyed on bruschetta with our own tomatoes and basil. The cheese maker is a friend of the farmers we trained with in Bellingham, and when we found out that he had no place to stay that night we ended up hosting him on our humble futon couch. We stayed up late talking about Bellingham, cheese making and farming before retiring (once again blurry and exhausted!). The next morning, we shared a big farm breakfast before starting work for the day.
After pulling four more beds of onions to cure, we cleaned ourselves up and headed to Portland that evening for a wonderful wedding of friends we met through the winter farm conference scene. They married in their yard, surrounded by friends and family and a few chickens too. It was a perfect Portland evening: lots of bikes, sunflowers, a red and pink chicken coop, delicious fresh food, beautiful poetry, love flowing everywhere, farmers, urban dwellers, and everything in between. We headed home later than we should, giddy from conversations with people we’d never met before but whom we’re pretty sure we’ll see again. We love how small the world can feel at times.
Sunday, our normally very quiet day off, was also less quiet than usual. We had our ritual slow breakfast over the Sunday paper, but then headed into town to visit my (Katie) parents. I’ve been helping my mom, Kris Bledsoe, a lot with her campaign for Yamhill County Commissioner. We worked on some more campaign material design stuff for a few hours before Casey and I split up for the evening: he attended a (tasteful!) bachelor party while I made dinner with a friend and watched a movie.
Whew! Not what I expected from the farming life, but a wonderful week nonetheless. We both feel like we’ve just completed a social marathon and are looking forward to this week’s work routine. Amazingly, we managed to work during this time too, but we still have a lengthy ‘to do’ list ahead of us. The main goal for today (Monday) is to start working up our fallow field and hopefully begin sowing our winter cover crop. Thanks to another rain shower on Sunday, the ground should finally be moist enough to work up without risking wind erosion. (Casey’s on the tractor chisel plowing right now, and as I look out I can see the swallows circling behind him, dipping to catch all the insects coming up from the ground.)
We’re excited to get moving on this project, because cover crops are something we hope to integrate into our farm as a replacement for off-farm fertility. We used to think we were crazy by thinking we could use cover crops as our primary soil building and fertility system, but it turns out that some researchers at OSU are working on a project with a similar thesis right now! Exciting! We’ll write more at length about our cover crop goals in another newsletter.
In the meantime, September has arrived, which means we’re definitely on the downhill slide towards fall. We’ve planted out almost all our fall and winter transplanted crops, including five beds of chicories and a second round of kales. The winter squash are getting close to maturity, and crows have returned to the island. Saturday night, the recorded low in McMinnville was 38° and many parts of Oregon received their first frost! Wow! And, of course, the ultimate sign of fall’s impending arrival: school starts this week.
Despite all these signs of fall, our fields are still full of gorgeous summer fruits. Enjoy the abundant late summer vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
