Farm Happenings at Potomac Vegetable Farms
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Week 16: the last summer shares!

Posted on September 9th, 2020 by Hana Newcomb

This is the last week of your summer shares! If you have joined the autumn season, it starts next week without pause. If you are ending your season with us now, THANK YOU! This season was challenging and filled with new details and hurdles. Despite it all, we are so pleased with how smoothly it went and hope that you enjoyed it as much as we did! If you are not sure if you signed up or not, you can sign into Harvie and check or email Becky to find out your status.

The new Farm Notes is online! We have researched the history of the farm back to the Native Americans that originally inhabited it, and reflect on our time as stewards of this land. 

Fall CSA DisplayFall arrived in the fields, suddenly.  So many summer crops have just given up with the rains and the cooler nights. Tomatoes ended abruptly. There will be a small trickle of tomatoes for a few more weeks, but we have to move on. We are gathering tons of winter squash (everything is so HEAVY in the fall) and putting it in the greenhouse to cure. Butternut squash, butterkin and honeynut need to be cured in a warm space for at least a week so they will get nice and sweet. The same is true for sweet potatoes. When they first come out of the ground, they do not taste very different from the soil where they grew. They taste starchy and a lot like dirt.  But after they sit in a warm greenhouse for a few weeks, they become delicious and sweet. And they keep getting sweeter as the months go by. Sweet potatoes are one of the perfect foods. We will start digging them as soon as we finish collecting up all the winter squash.

In other good news, all the seeds that we have been planting are germinating beautifully. There are rows of Hakurei turnips, mustards, radishes, carrots, bok choy looking perky and happy. This is what we will all be eating in about a month. It all tastes and looks better than it sounds!  If you haven't eaten your way through a fall season in this area, you are in for a treat.

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