(CSA Newsletter: Week 34)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
- Romaine & French crisphead lettuces — Two lettuces per share from a random assortment of our best sweet summer lettuces
- Sweet Corn OR beets — Maybe this seems like a funny choice, but we know there are some serious beet lovers in the crowd. And some serious beet haters. Hopefully you can both be happy this week!
- Tomatoes — More delicious tomatoes! The season continues!
- Broccoli — The broccoli exploded this week. If it weren’t for the raining causing some of it to get ‘head rot,’ we would have been able to give each share five or more heads. As it was, many heads dropped in quality as a result of the big rain over the weekend. It’s still a lot of broccoli though!
- Eggplant — Lots of eggplant — try some of the recipes in this week’s newsletter.
- Cucumbers
- Summer squash
- Carrots
- Potatoes
- Sweet onions
Last week we officially made the turn into autumn. Casey and I were driving off the island just at sunset last Wednesday and managed to catch a beautiful sight: in front of us (due west) we could see the sun setting, lined up perfectly with the east-west oriented road; and, directly behind us (due east), we could see the full moon rising, lined up perfectly with the road as well. I wish we could have taken more time to observe the equinox, but that little moment was magical in of itself (albeit if it occurred while rushing to our weekly Protect Grand Island meeting).
There have been other signs of fall’s arrival this week. We can hear the sound of propane cannons scaring birds away from ripening vineyards in the hills. The leaves on the new Sugar Maple that we planted this spring have turned brilliant red and begun falling to the ground. And huge flocks of starlings dance in the sky at dusk.
Our work has shifted too, both during the workday and during our own personal hours. It’s definitely time to prepare for the rainy season’s arrival in earnest. We’ve been bringing in fall harvests to store: winter squash, potatoes, beets, onions … We moved our wash station set-up to its new, more sheltered home in the carport in the pole building next door. And, on the weekends, we’ve been cleaning out all the spaces that grew cluttered over the summer, moving and stacking firewood for the winter, and hoeing out grass around young trees.
This weekend we got another ‘sneak preview’ of the season to come: fog, rain, breezes and gray skies. Today (Monday) marks the first of what promises to be summer’s final last hoorah: unseasonably warm temperatures during the day and at night.
The flying insects are going crazy at our farm right now — they are flying erratically and seem almost desperate to do something important before the cold season shuts them down. The wasps are especially active right now, making me nervous as Rusty and I walk and play outside. We were playing under the shed roof that used to house our wash station and now serves as a porch/covered play area, and I looked down to see a giant wasp on Rusty’s hand! Fortunately, I managed to swat it off before he was stung, but it made me understandably nervous about all the yellow jackets and wasps in the air and on the ground right now.
It’s also the start of soup season, which Casey kicked off by making a giant quadruple batch of chili featuring all kinds of vegetables, beans and Mossback Farm beef. We managed to feed ourselves for several meals, as well as my parents one meal, and we brought 1.5 gallons to our friends at Growing Wild Farm who are busy adoring their precious new baby (which is also an appropriate activity for this season).
And, we’re in the thick of apple season. The apple trees we planted last year produced fruit this year — not a lot, but enough for our household to enjoy in abundance. We’ve been eating Akane, Honeycrisp, and Liberty apples so far, all of which have been delicious. My mom picked three buckets of apples from the trees on their next-door property this weekend with plans to make sauce for eating all winter. Since apples are a fruit that Casey and I could eat every day, we are glad to have so many trees! Hopefully in the next few years, we will have enough to share with the CSA as well.
Enjoy this week’s fall vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
P.S. Reminder! Final $240 payment due this week for those of you on the quarterly payment plan!
