(CSA Newsletter: Week 40)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
As you’ve probably heard us mention many times before, we once lived in a mountain community. Located at 3200’ in the North Cascades, our community annually received an average of 260” of snow. That’s a lot of snow. For just under half the year, we knew that snow would cover our entire landscape. Tools left out on accident in late fall could very well be covered by snow and not seen again until May or June. Thus, each fall, community members would begin speaking of things to do ‘before the snow flies.’ If it didn’t happen before, it wouldn’t happen after.
Here in our low-lying Willamette Valley, the winter weather situation is (thankfully) not nearly so dramatic. However, here at the farm, we have our own mild version of a fall weather shut-down: the arrival of the rainy season.
Yes, we can still locate tools after two inches of rainfall, but many other tasks on the farm come to a stand still once ‘the rain arrives.’ We can no longer plant or weed, and building projects become much slower and harder.
So, each late summer, we make a list of things to do ‘before the rain arrives,’ and then we hope that we can time our tasks appropriately. It’s always a bit of a gamble, since we usually get a few early rains followed by dry breaks before the real wet season sets in.
This year, thanks to the help of our interns Daniel and Erika, we got almost everything on the list done well in advance of the rain. However, we continued to wait on planting our over-wintering onions through October. We’ve had bad luck the last two years with our over-wintered onions ‘bolting’ in the spring, and we realized it might be because we were planting them too early in the fall. So, even though we wanted to plant them in every dry spell, we kept waiting and waiting — trusting that there’d be another dry spell just around the corner.
Thankfully, our gamble paid off this time around. Casey and I managed to plant the onion starts (3400 total) last Wednesday afternoon, during what was probably the final dry spell of 2009. By Thursday evening, the rains had arrived: buckets and buckets of rain. Here on the farm, we’ve received almost 4” of rainfall in just about four days. The ground is super-saturated, and there’s no way we’ll be planting or weeding again until after the new year (often January and February bring dry, cold weather that allows us to get some extra winter work in, even though the real sustained dry weather doesn’t arrive again until May).
Since we did manage to get our onions in, we’ve been enjoying the stormy fall weather. It’s been a good occasion to work on inside tasks (seed lists, articles, etc.). But, we do have our fingers crossed for maybe one more dry-ish spell, because we took delivery this week of an exciting package … a box of organic strawberry plants!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, after resisting it for years, we’re diving into strawberry land. Since this will be our first time growing them, we can’t promise much, but hopefully within a year or two strawberries will be a part of our May and June CSA shares (usually a lean time that we thought needed an extra dose of awesome-ness). Even if the dry-ish spell doesn’t arrive, we’ll just go muck it up and get those plants lodged in the ground somehow. I’m sure they’ll survive either way. One thing we’ve learned over the years is that plants are more resilient than we ever expect (within reason). We hope so anyway!!!!!!
As far as vegetables for your plate during this season, we’ve got some great ones this week. The CSA shares are looking more and more like fall and winter with the introduction of Brussels sprouts, butternut squash and turnips. The stormy weather is a perfect opportunity to roast vegetables or make a big batch of warming soup. Enjoy this week’s vegetables!
Your farmers, Katie & Casey Kulla
Reminder! Sign up NOW for 2010 CSA!
If you’d like to continue eating delicious local seasonal vegetables from Oakhill Organics, please sign up now to reserve your spot in our 2010 season! The 2010 season begins the first week in February and runs through mid-December. The price is $960 for the 45 week season, but no money is due until after the first of the year.
To reserve your spot, simply fill out a ‘Commitment Form’ at the CSA pick-up. Please do it soon so that we know how many spots we have to fill from our waiting list! Questions? Ask us at pick-up or email us.
Fall is muddy. So is the produce.
Just a quick note: as I’m sure you’re aware, we do our best to rinse your produce each week before bringing it to the CSA pick-up. In every season, there is always some dust or dirt to remove so that you can focus on doing just a final cleaning in your own kitchen.
In fall and winter, however, the vegetables often come out of the fields extra dirty because of the wet rain and mud. We continue to do our best to remove as much of the field soil as possible, but we recommend that you take extra care with washing your vegetables again at home before preparing.
