2024 CSA Newsletter #18
I hope you were able to catch the Aurora Borealis last. They blew my daughter's mind! It was a spectacular way to end the week at the farm. Last week was light in farm tasks due to being a little short-staffed, but we continued to plug away at our fall tasks. The big accomplishment was beginning to prep beds for garlic planting, which will happen in the next few weeks. I'll go into more detail once we start planting, but we aim to plant our garlic around Halloween at the earliest. If you're looking for seed garlic to plant, we purchase from our good friends at Buried Treasures Organic Farm in Groton.
As the season winds down, I wanted to take a moment to start highlighting the projects my interns are working on for their Capstone course. After this semester, they will be finished with their Sustainable Farming and Food Systems degree at Tompkins Cortland. This course allows them to design a self-directed food-system project that interacts with the community. The first project that I want to share with you is in collaboration with The Panther Pantry on TC3's campus. The pantry provides a great service to the campus community but one thing that is still an issue is food waste. I have a student who is developing a composting program with the pantry. Part of this program will be to host a workshop and create materials to share with users the dos and donts, and the benefits of composting. Over the years, projects around minimizing food waste have always been of interest to students. I am always impressed with the different ideas that students come up with around this important area of our food system.
The CSA share this week is going to be a little wonky. I usually have a better idea of what the breakdown and combinations are going to be when I am writing the week's newsletter. Well, we've been racing against the weather and trying to harvest crops that may not make it to the end of the week because of the impending frost, so there will be a lot of sorting tomorrow as we prepare for the CSA pickup. This week there will be more of the Hakurei turnip/radish choice, cucumbers, fennel, hot peppers, bell/frying peppers, garlic, cherry tomatoes, beefsteak, and heirloom tomatoes. The tomatoes are going to be at various stages of ripeness. The lettuce mix is returning this week. There will also be scallions for the first time. I'm also adding a habanero salt to the spice choice this week. There may be some of the specialty peppers this week, but I will need to see if we have time to harvest them.
Have a great week!
-Farmer Todd