The fall equinox is this week and the CSA Boxes will very much reflect this change of seasons – our first leafy green of fall (chard), the first pomegranates, and our second week of winter squash. No tomatoes in the boxes for the first time in months and it’s also the last full week of the flower season. As sad as it is to think about the impending end of the tomatoes and flowers, there’re lots of other exciting things to distract us.
A major task is preparing for the Hoes Down Harvest Festival, which is less than two weeks away (October 3). The list of tasks is unending – it’s a lot of work to turn a farm into a festival site! One thing that’s ready is the bed of flowers for the Hoes Down u-pick! We’re hoping the sudan grass for the maze and pumpkins for carving will also be ready. If you’ve been holding off on getting your tickets, now’s the time! Tickets and more information about music, workshops, activities for children, and food are available on the Hoes Down website.
The walnut orchard where festivalgoers will sleep is not ready yet. First we have some walnuts to harvest, which we do by shaking the trees! If you go there right now, you’d find that the orchard floor has been mowed and there are windrows of nuts on the ground. These are the nuts that fell off the tree on their own. We don’t want these nuts to get crushed under the tires of the shaker. Once these nuts are picked up, we can start shaking the trees and then picking up those nuts! Learn more here.
The wreath room is chock-full of flowers. The flower area of our wash/pack area has become an overflow backup drying area, and the air smells like Sweet Annie. The flower team will be switching over to wreaths and dried bouquets as soon as we’re done harvesting fresh flowers. Very soon we’ll have wreaths and dried bouquets available for you to bring to your homes!
Similarly, the kitchen team has been busy preserving tomatoes (drying tomatoes and making sauce and jam) so that we can still enjoy tomatoes after the season ends. Among all that work, they’re starting to make pumpkin tea cakes, a staple of fall.
As already mentioned, leafy greens are just starting up, and there are a lot more coming ; Andrew has been very busy planting. I love seeing the neat rows of transplants and it’s also fun guessing what some of the little, just-germinated seeds will turn out to be. All of the brassicas (kale, collards, cabbage, broccoli, rutabaga, turnips) look identical right after sprouting and it takes a while for them to differentiate themselves. In the picture below, it’s mizuna (green and purple).
To take one quick look back at summer, instead of thinking of the fall ahead, someone wrote last week “What happened with the stone fruit this year? There didn’t seem to be any peaches!” Well… after removing some peaches last year, we were starting with fewer trees. While we’ve planted more trees, they’ve got a few years until we’ll be harvesting from them. We didn’t get much fruit from the remaining trees, which were hit with too cold then too hot weather during a critical period in March, then we had a lot of rain, perfect for spreading all sorts of pathogens. Some varieties of stone fruit had no fruit (several apricot and peach varieties) and others had a very light crop (plums and some peaches). The Blenheim apricot crop was normal enough, but as many of you experienced, had a lot of scarring from shot hole. Let’s hope that next summer, which will be here before we know it, will be a better fruit season than this one.
Happy autumn!
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager