And this would be the week that Jack Frost came to the farm. His visit was marked by sweeping the creosote from the chimney, the first firing of the wood stove, sheets over the pepper plants, salvage harvests of the final field tomatoes, and screens being swapped for storm windows. The predicted low for our township on Friday night was 38, but we’ve learned that our low spot in the glacial valley will usually drop further, so we were not taken unawares by the frost that came to the field, icing leaves and freezing flowers, with the temp bottoming out below 30 degrees.

It’s hard to believe that just the weekend before, I was sweating on the screen porch and not wanting to go outside into the sunshine, but that’s Minnesconsin for ya. And it looks like there is worse to come this week – I see a predicted low of 30, which could mean a hard freeze of 20 in the field! So this will be a week of preparing for that.

Woo hoo!

inside Box 16

Today was marked by yet another instance of rainy harvest, which seems to have happened a ridiculous number of times this season, given how very little rainfall we’ve had in general. It makes it tricky to pack things into paper bags, but other than that we made do pretty easily with the help of a couple of retired market canopies.

Salad mix– Neighbor Marcia suggests using these leaves in wraps and on sandwiches.

Potatoes – The “All Blue” variety. They may make an odd-looking potato leek soup, but we figure you get white-fleshed potatoes most of your life. Plus these are more nutritious!

Jester acorn squash – Mom cuts these in half and steams them upside down in the oven, and then fills the bowl with butter and brown sugar. Or you could make it a main dish bu salting, oiling, baking and filling it with chicken and wild rice soup or a rice pilaf.

Ground cherries – the sweet and cute little sibling of tomatillos. We sorted out any bad or green ones but, to spare our sanity may have left some that were not completely ripe. We like both flavors – the sweet and tart and the smooth mellow ones.

Leeks – We figured out a great way to plant these using a slightly tapered table leg. Seems to have worked out well! There might be dirt between the layers, since the whole white part is grown underground. If you slice them lengthwise, you can clean out any grit that snuck in. Some recipes say to discard the green top part, but it’s still quite edible. Chop em up and sautee them in dishes!

Parsley- Great in soup, and tis the season … potato leek soup? If you roast veggies, you can toss this with them when taken from the over, to balance the earthly veggies with a fresh bright flavor.

Sweet Pepper Medley – With hard frosts looming, we harvested all the sweet peppers in the field, so this box is bountiful with them! Have you tried simply eating the red ones raw like apples? Quite good.

Eggplant – The cold weather this week is going to put an end to eggplants. We ate some sliced, salted, and fried (no batter or coating) the other night and I thought, I am going to miss you eggplant.

Salad Tomatoes – Some of the season’s last!

So this was the week that summer came back for just long enough to remind us that we didn’t actually love everything about it. By today, after a few sweaty days and sticky nights, we were all happy to get back to bemoaning how chilly and gray things are, which we’d only just barely been able to get into last week.

With all the temperature changes, you’d think we’d have had an abundance of stormy rainfall, but of course that isn’t how the drips fall out on the Barrens. We had just shy of 1/2″ total … enough to whet the thirst of the fall salad, to be sure. And although it’s easy to feel angsty over how dry things have been for us this year, it’s refreshing to realize that too much moisture is just as much of a problem – perhaps more, since we can irrigate, but farms who got swamped this season can’t turn on a field dryer.

We did plenty of fruit scavenging and foraging – mostly tart crabapples from a friend’s place and wild grapes from the Barrens by the farm. We learned that the low-hanging grapes most readily accessible were woody-tasting and made for mediocre preserves, so we adapted, using our advanced ape brains to acquire the sweeter, plumper, most abundant fruit from 30 feet in the air.

The grape vines that were most successful at graping had often killed their host trees, by stealing all their sunlight. This meant that there were grape buffets way up high out of reach … unless some enterprising primates realized how weakened the grape-killed tree scaffold was, and rocked the entire thing until it crashed to the ground for easy picking! Much celebrating and jelly was made in the wake of this discovery.

Box 15

Fall Salad Mix – First cutting! A less lettuce-y mix than our spring salad, with a variety of flavors and textures. It includes: Curly green lettuce, cavendish red lettuce, arugula, green and red mizuna, tat soi, and a few pea tips with more to come.

Dang it, I meant to take a photo of the beautiful mix all laid out on the processing table!

Tomatoes – A nice addition to your salad.

Bok Choy – did you know that “the Cantonese word choy can be translated loosely as ‘cooking greens’”? I just read that in Mark Bittman’s great reference for storing and cooking vegetables, How to Cook Everything. If you have Amazon Prime it’s free through Prime Reading.

Onions – Good in most things really. Not many things will as quickly bring a spouse around sniffing the air and proclaiming hunger as do onions hitting a hot frying pan.

Tomatillos – Good in a few things. People often ask what to do with these and salsa is the play. But I have also used them to make a southwestern chicken soup, or they can be sautéed with other veggies, or eaten raw …  but the main thing we do is broil or grill them, and blend them up with garlic, onion, and salt. I like that they have a sweet and tangy flavor and that they make a thick, not runny, salsa.

Peppers – sweet ripe ones and a few jalapeños. Good for salsa, fajitas, stir fry, or crunching on raw. I can tell the night temperatures have been warmer this year because of the amount of ripe peppers that we’ve been harvesting.

Broccoli heads – maybe some broccoli cheddar soup, broccoli casserole, or a broccoli quiche? Something warm and hearty sounds good to me today.

Zucchini – Still going, until the frost comes.

Cucumbers

Spaghetti squash – More potential than just treating it like spaghetti. It could be baked into a cheesy casserole or even used with an Asian peanut sauce 

 

This week was a quintessential summer/fall cusp kinda week, I’d say.

Cool nights, warm days, only going into the field to harvest, cutting and stacking firewood, planting fruit trees, thinking ahead to winter a bit.

We foraged up a bunch of wild grapes, made tomato sauce and smoky salsa, and let Otis start tasting the fruits of the field.

And we went to the wedding party for our 2016-17 field helper extraordinaire, Sarah.

The harvest today went smoothly, with gorgeous weather, even though we had a small crew; helped that we pulled the soybean plants and did all the edamame picking yesterday afternoon!

Looks like we’ll get at least one more week of warm weather crops – no frost in the forecast, which is nice, since sometimes it can happen as early as September 15^{th … (!!)}

Box 14: The Innards

• Edamame –  The boil, salt, snack method is the gold standard! Make sure you cook them long enough that the beans will easily come out of the pods! Ooooorrrr you can shell them, and maybe toss in a stirfry, or make hummus!
• French breakfast radishes –  We tried to give you enough to make roasting them a worthwhile en-devour – perhaps with the carrots! If you’re not eating them tonight, cut off the greens – and save them – you can sautee them, or maybe make a radish leaf pesto! (Don’t forget to wash them though – we rinsed them, but they tend to hold dirt stubbornly.)
• Carrots

• Zucchini –  Zuke season is winding down fast!
• Cucumbers – also winding down.
• Eggplant –  Still going strong.  You’ve all been on this ride before – you know how to eat these by now I reckon …
• Tomatoes –  a bag of delicious Sun Gold and Chocolate Cherries, plus an heirloom  slicer.

• Watermelon (some red, some yellow)
• Sweet Peppers –  (mostly bells, with some assorted other varieties.  

• Broccoli – still the sideshoots from the Spring crop – the Fall broccoli are coming along – maybe even next week!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this week’s news, the plants are senescing (spellcheck doesn’t know that one)! Weeds are dying and leaves are starting to turn! AUTUMN IS COMING! The Harvest Party will be October 14th – mark your calendars! And it’s just 5 boxes left after this one, before Winter comes for us all.

We started the process of planting two new pear trees … but they’re not in the ground yet. First we’ll have to cut down some standing dead oak trees, which meant we first had to move some old tractor implements and a couple of wood piles out of the impact zone.

This, plus starting to build up our winter’s worth of woodpiles “upstairs’ took an entire afternoon … later this week we can cut down the trees, dig and amend the planting holes, etc … and then double our pear tree population!

We did plenty of canning – made fire-roasted salsa, tomato sauce, and some deliciously tart crab apple jelly.

 

 

After a week filled with dry soil and endless near-misses, we finally got rain … as Steffan said, “if it’s going to rain, of course it will be on harvest day!”

We set up a couple of market canopies and hurried to

CSA Box 13

• Tomatoes – enjoy them while we can – we have now started to pull out plants stricken with the dreaded blight, but it will likely spread quickly regardless. Fortunately, hopefully, the plants in the high tunnel – shielded from dew and rain –  are still doing well and should continue to produce at least some goodies to share with you for weeks to come.
• Broccoli –  It’s been a great broccoli year; hope you like it, because we’re happy to be able to give it to you week after week ….

• Cucumbers 
• Zucchini
• Sweet Peppers – bells, Carmen (long red)

• Watermelons – yellow or red

• Onions
• Potatoes – mix of red, gold, & blues
• Fennel – try sautéed with the peppers and some sausage, or roasted with your potatoes?
• Hops – (provided to those who requested them – let us know if you want any next week, there are still plenty!)