Welcome to the first week of Winter Shares! And, by golly, nature has made sure it feels like winter rather than fall. For those new to our farm, each delivery announcement will be accompanied by this "Farm Happenings" newsletter. Only the first few sentences make it into the body of the email; the rest can be viewed by clicking "continue reading," and I encourage you to so. We share not only farm news, but important share information and logistics.
Farm Update
This past week was our first week off from share packing in 20 weeks. The idea was to give us a breather before the start of winter shares so we could catch up on other projects - finish harvesting storage crops, take down trellis, pick up irrigation lines, plant garlic, and maybe even start on bigger projects like deer fence construction.
How do you think this weather - 6" of snow on the ground, single-digit lows - affected that plan?! Yeah, didn't help. In anticipation of the snow and cold, we hustled and got the last of our storage crops harvested moments before the snow started. As for the rest of those projects, they all got pushed back to next week. The first week of November will be the latest we have ever planted garlic, but it's not unheard of, and a relatively warm 10-day forecast should help the cloves get established. We bought in some beautiful new seed garlic this year, so we hope for a crop of large heads next year.
The project I've been spending a good deal of time planning is construction of a deer fence. This season has made it crystal clear that a full-fledged deer fence is absolutely necessary if we are to continue growing lettuce, carrots, sweet potatoes, beets, spinach, and an increasingly long list of vegetables the deer have destroyed this year. And in our attempts to protect certain crops by covering them with large (and expensive) fabric sheets, the deer have just destroyed those, too, adding to the economic toll. We are planning to have a mile-long, 10-foot-tall fence built around all our production fields, hopefully even yet this fall. This will be a truly deer-proof fence - just need to make sure we don't leave gates open!
Another unfortunate impact of the unseasonably cold weather (we got down to 8 degrees F on Monday night!) is it took out some field plantings we had anticipated having available for the first 1-2 deliveries of Winter Shares. We had a large planting of broccoli that would have let us put 2-3 heads in every share - but, hardy as broccoli is, it was irreversibly damaged on those cold nights. We also likely lost Swiss chard, arugula, and salad radishes. The jury is still out on salad mix - it looks pretty rough right now, but we are hoping the snow cover protected it from the cold and it may recover when the weather warms next week. If so, we should have field-grown salad mix available for the second box, allowing us to save the high tunnel plantings for the deeper winter months.
While we still have a few big pushes before true winter sets in in a month, we do see the shift to our off-season mode unfolding. Rachel and Travis - who joined us from North Carolina this spring and were invaluable in their roles as a crew leader and all-around handyman, respectively - will be heading back east in two weeks. They had planned to continue working with us through the winter, but family matters related to the pandemic have caused them to return to North Carolina. Michael will also be here for another couple weeks before heading back home to Missouri. And that will leave Sarah to lead the Winter Share wash-and-pack effort through the winter.
While most of the produce going into Winter Shares is already harvested and in cold storage, we do have spinach, salad mix, and kale growing (slowly) in our unheated high tunnels.
We are also excited about our new system for growing microgreens during the winter. While we grow them on benches in our greenhouse from May through October, it's not remotely cost-effective to heat our greenhouse during the winter for the relatively small number of growing trays we use for microgreens. But we did build a small shed last year to house our new well's irrigation controller, pressure tank, and associated componentry - this building is insulated and must be heated during the winter. So...we've outfitted it with shelving and grow lights, resulting in a very efficient system to keep microgreens growing through the winter! Below are the first winter share's microgreens as of Thursday. They'll be harvested on Monday.
Notes on items in this week's shares:
- Butternut squash this week will be a mix of the last of the crop grown on our farm (which received damage from the hailstorm) and some that we grew at a neighbor's farm (which received negligible hail). So a percentage of the fruits may have a couple hail pocks, but substantially fewer than we put into summer shares.
- Gold potatoes and red potatoes will pair nicely with the many other good soup ingredients in this week's box - carrots, leeks, parsley, and squash.
- We mass harvested our remaining leeks from the field before the snow and cold set in. In order to ensure that most members got the chance to receive leeks in their box, we had to make the bunches fairly small, about 1/2 the size of our usual bunches, and some bunches will be comprised of smaller diameter leeks.
- Garlic this week is German Extra Hardy variety from our friends at Grinnell Heritage Farm, who provided this beautiful organic garlic for us since our own crop wasn't sufficient to meet the needs of our members this season.
- Lacinato and green curly kale, like the leeks, were mass harvested before the extreme cold we saw for a few nights earlier this week. As we often do in our final harvest of the season, we simple chopped off the entire top of the plants, including the young developing leaves. As a result, these'll look a little different than the uniformly large sized leaves you received in bunches earlier in the season. The quality is great and the bunches will be large!
- Spinach appears to be one of the survivors of the single digits we saw last weekend, being very cold hardy and partially protected by snow. This frost-sweetened spinach is tasty! Most of this week's spinach will have medium-to-large leaf size. You'll enjoy this equally in a salad or sautéed. As was the case with the spinach in the second-to-last summer share, this spinach is growing amid lots of volunteer grass cover crop seedlings (read: weeds). Harvest will be tedious and we'll try to keep grass out of your bag, but I'm sure a few will slip by us. Just a heads up.
- Microgreens this week is our Mild Mix, a blend of baby kale, cabbage, mizuna, and kohlrabi. It's crisp and mild-flavored and a great accompaniment to salads, sandwiches, omelets, and meats.
- Parsley will also be freshly harvested out of the field. This cold-hardy herbs seems to have fared alright in the cold, although you might see a few dark green leaves in your bunch as a result of the cold. The sample bunch I harvested seems to be holding up just fine in our fridge.
This week's Hot Sauce/Salsa Add-on is Bailout Hot Sauce from Lost Capital Foods, the makers of the Liquid Assets hail storm fundraiser sauce. They describe it this way: "Ripe red chile and mango, rounded out by roasted garlic and caramelized onion. A sauce made to bail you out of any trouble at the dinner table."
Subscribers to the Kimchi Add-on Share will receive a quart of their chosen spice level in their share this week.
If you didn't sign up for one of those add-ons, but kimchi, hot sauce, and salsa sound pretty good right about now, remember that we do have an array of those items available as extras for purchase!
Thanks for being a part of our first-ever customizable Winter Share season!
Dana
