We bought special "husking pegs" (the blade mounted on Casey's hand) for hand harvesting our massive amounts of dry corn.
Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Celery OR Komatsuna — Komatsuna is an Asian mustard green, great for cooking or chopping as a hardier (and stronger flavored) salad.
- Grapes
- Tomatoes
- Green peppers
- Jimmy Nordello sweet peppers
- Cucumbers and zucchini
- Carrots
- Delicata winter squash
- Red cipollini onions
What have we been up to lately on the farm? Harvest! ‘Tis the season!
We’re finally, for the first time in months and months, fully staffed. We have five folks working for us right now (four of them part-time), and it’s been great having enough hands to have several projects going at once. There is almost always someone harvesting something, whether it be for the weekly CSA shares, the restaurants, or for longer term storage.
This weekend, Casey and one of our employees put in a few unexpected hours of harvest after we had our first frost. It was a sneaky frost that only hit our lowest ground, so we were totally unprepared for it. Apparently (and unfortunately), we had planted some of our frost sensitive crops in a low frost “pocket” (where the cold air settles on these moderately cold fall nights).
So, most of our ground was unaffected, but they did have to pull many of the sweet pepper plants (and row covered the rest) as well as pick up the remaining harvested winter squash. (Casey thought he was just picking up “a few” last winter squash and it turned out to be a full gator load! Clearly our concept of scale has shifted!)
We were worried that the cane sorghum would be destroyed by the frost, but Casey called a Southern supplier of sorghum mills and learned that it’s common to wait to harvest until after a few hard frosts, so we’re going to keep working on our goal to acquire a mill and make some syrup this fall!
Some of the most exciting harvests of late have been the various experimental grains we’re growing for the Full Diet CSA. Our neighbor with the combine has been coming at odd hours (after dinner last Monday, for example) to harvest our little plots. We now have hundreds of pounds of flax seed and millet, and we have teff and lima beans curing for a future combine run.
Casey has also started the huge task of hand harvesting our dry corn. He picked ten bins quickly recently, which is barely a “dent” in the crop (corny corn joke — if you get it, then you know your field corn types!). We’ll definitely have to have all hands on deck to bring the corn in, but fortunately the only deadline for that is the first flood of the season (because it’s in low ground) — the dry corn does fine through frosts. We’ll be curing it fully using a farmer friend’s batch hazelnut dryer in November (after he is mostly done with his nut crop) — so many new techniques to learn as we go!
Speaking of the Full Diet CSA, we still have room for a few more households. If you are thinking about participating, I encourage you to turn in your completed form and deposit ASAP (forms are available on our website: www.oakhillorganics.org). Let me know if you have any questions!
If you are planning to participate in the veggie CSA again next year, we’d like to hear from you too! I’ve attached the sign-up form again to the back of this newsletter for your convenience.
And, a final reminder that it’s time to pay up for the 2012 CSA — we need everyone to pay the remainder of your balance. I sent our email statements a few weeks back, but if you have forgotten your balance, you can email me: farm (at) oakhillorganics (dot) org.
We hope you are taking advantage of these continued dry days — wow, what a gift! Rainy days will come soon, but for now it’s wonderful weather for being outside!
Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
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Pumpkin Patch Open House coming up!
Mark the date on your calendar — on Sunday, October 28, we’ll be hosting our annual pumpkin patch open house here at the farm! The pumpkins look amazing already. I’m not sure what other activities we’ll have in store — our minds have been occupied elsewhere lately, but we’ll pull together some fun stuff and yummy things to taste!
