Fall and Winter Notes

Thanks to all of you who came out to see us on Saturday at our Harvest Fair and Pumpkin Patch! It was great to see so many CSA members there. (We’ll have some pictures to post next week.)

This time of year the farm is in transition. Those of you who were here Saturday saw that we have many fields coming out of food crops and ready to plant into the winter cover crops. Cover crops serve several purposes on an organic farm. They improve the soil structure, help prevent erosion, and provide nutrients for the next season’s vegetable crops. We plant a mix of legumes and grains (one of our favorite mixes consists of bell beans, peas, vetch and oats). Varieties of barley and rye are also good for holding the soil on sloped hillsides during winter rains and providing scaffolding for the peas and vetch to climb. The legumes (beans and peas) are “nitrogen-fixers”–they absorb nitrogen from the air and a type of codependent bacteria stores it in nodules in the plants roots. We let the cover crops grow for several months, then mow them down and incorporate all the organic matter into the soil before planting.

In addition to planting cover crops, we’re also preparing next year’s strawberry field. Strawberry planting is very labor intensive, and it’s important to get the beds worked up before the first big rains come. This fall work is nearly as intense as spring planting time, and the uncertainty over how much time we have before the first rainstorms always adds an edge of urgency!

We have harvested most of our winter squash from the field and put a lot of it in storage. The winter squash will sweeten up over the next few weeks post harvest. We’ll be planting some fields into crops that go through the winter — such as kales, chards, collards, cabbage, lettuce, leeks, carrots, cilantro, beets, celery, cauliflower, romanesco, broccoli, beets and fennel. Some of the more tender items like arugula, baby turnips, radishes and baby spinach, we will plant inside our high-tunnels.

The fall session of the CSA deliveries continues until November 20th and 21st. Our fall crops will be a nice mix of the late summer vegetables and the fall fruits and winter squashes. After that we will go into our winter delivery schedule, which will be seven biweekly deliveries from December 4th and 5th until February 26th and 27th. Then we’ll take a couple weeks off and begin our regular weekly deliveries on March 19th and 20th 2014.

Instead of having a special winter session to sign up for this year, your subscriptions will simply continue into the winter deliveries. We will deliver to almost all pick-up sites, so most of you don’t have to worry about switching sites for the winter (if you do, we’ll let you know). You’ll be able to put your subscription on hold if you don’t want to get the winter deliveries, or for a week or two if you are going to be away. Any money left on your account at the end of the fall season will simply carry into winter, unless you put yourself on hold. We’ll have more details in the following weeks.