(CSA Newsletter: Fall Week 1)
Meet this week’s vegetables:
Welcome to the 2007 fall season! Some of you are joining the CSA this week, so an extra special welcome to newcomers. Please let us know if you have any questions as we journey through the next six weeks of fall seasonal eating.
Here at the farm, fall continues to be the most relaxed season of our year so far. We’ve had more time to reflect than usual; we feel like we’re finally catching up mentally with the last two seasons of physical work (starting the farm and building our house). We’re taking advantage of the mental space and time to reflect on our first season on our new land while the season is still fresh in our minds. Since we surveyed you all recently about your experience this year, we thought we would share with you some of our thoughts as well.
As we heard from you, we think that this season went and continues to go well, especially considering how much we had to establish from scratch this year. We were pleased with the improvement we saw in the overall quality and quantity of our vegetables, but we definitely have specific things we’d like to improve upon next year.
First of all, we plan to have more fresh eating greens for the CSA. With our finite water source this year, we found ourselves continually conserving water in the fields. Not surprisingly, lettuce is a thirsty plant, and we lost quite a few heads to ‘bolting’ (going prematurely to seed) due to our water situation. Fortunately, with our new well and water rights, we hope to have more consistent success with every lettuce planting so that we can provide a fresh eating green (lettuce, arugula, etc.) almost every week of the main CSA season.
Overall, the increase in quantity and reliability of our new water source should help us improve many parts of the operation. We hope to have more sweet corn and better peppers and melons — all of which were deemed lower priority in our summer water triage assessment.
But we’re also rethinking some of our variety choices for next year. This year we ‘trialed’ many different varieties, which made some of our plantings a hodge-podge of semi-useful different veggies. Next year, we’re aiming to streamline down to a few very good, consistent varieties for some of our veggies, including the aforementioned peppers and melons. We spent a recent morning reflecting on which seed varieties to keep from this year and which new ones to try. As is always the case when making seed order lists, we think we’ve chosen some real winners for next year. And, even with our ‘stream-lining,’ we’ll still be growing over 190 distinct varieties.
We’re also planning to add some new items that we’ve enjoyed in the past or have had repeated requests for, including cilantro, fresh shelling beans (similar to favas but for summer eating), Jerusalem artichokes, rhubarb, and asparagus (although the asparagus won’t be ready to harvest for several years).
And, in terms of things that went really well this year that we specifically hope to repeat: we loved having so many delicious carrots and plan to plant even more next year. We also enjoyed our over-wintering spring sweet onions and have already planted four beds for next spring. And, of course, our little sweet potato experiment was a huge success, so we’ll be planting enough of those next year to supply you several weeks worth in the late summer.
We have other ideas for next year too that are less immediately relevant to your CSA experience. For example, we plan to change the orientation of our beds from north-south to east-west. Although traditional wisdom says this is a less ideal orientation for growing veggies, we realized after this year that an east-west orientation would simplify our field layout. We could eliminate two current roadway spaces between fields and easily bury a convenient irrigation mainline to access any of our beds in both fields. These pros seem to outweigh potential negatives, especially since they could save us significant space and time on the farm. We grew in the east-west orientation last year to some success, so we’ll at least try it once more.
We also plan to update and improve our farm infrastructure this winter. At this point, almost every part of our farm was developed in a rush. Amazingly, many aspects work great, such as our irrigation pipes and our tractor. But we still lack enough dry space to cover all of our tools for the winter, so we’ll be building a small pole barn this winter. We also hope to build a new more permanent hot house space to replace the small makeshift hot house we’ve used the last two years. And, we’re going to build a new cooler so that we can better cool the summer vegetables before delivering them to you. Finally, we plan to improve our wash station area by covering it and pouring a concrete floor, which we hope will make the washing routine more efficient and comfortable. Of course, you won’t directly see these changes when you pick up your share, but we hope that starting next season with more effective infrastructure will free us to focus all our attention on the vegetables in the field.
Anyhow, those are a few of our thoughts on the season. If you have more feedback that you think would be useful to us as we plan, please let us know at any point of the fall season.
We hope that the fall proves to be as tasty as summer and spring were. This week’s share is a good opener: we have a bit of everything to offer, from roots and onions to cooking and fresh eating greens. Whether you roast your veggies or make a big soup, we hope you enjoy them.
Your farmers,
Katie & Casey Kulla
Oakhill Organics
P.S. A big thank you to everyone at YCAP for hosting us this fall and winter at the food bank warehouse!
Want to help our friends at the food bank this holiday season? On Saturday, December 1, you’re invited to join us farmers and other CSA members to help sort donations at the food bank. The time of day for our work party is yet to be decided, but if you’re interested, put the date on your calendar. It should be fun: there will be lots of treats, and kids are welcome!
The temperature outside is getting colder … warm up with roasted vegetables: chop up any roast-able vegetable, throw in a roasting pan with other roast-able vegetables, sprinkle with olive oil and salt, roast until tender and beginning to caramelize. These week’s most roast-able veggies: celeriac, carrots, squash, onions, and fingerling potatoes. Feeding a crowd? Roast them all for one meal!
