CSA Newsletter #21
Well, folks, the end of the CSA is approaching quickly. Next Wednesday, 11/3, is our final official week of the 2021 season. For those of you who notified me about the "bonus week", I'll be in touch regarding that pickup. In the meantime, we keep plugging away at end of the season jobs. As crazy as the weather has been this season, I realized another another outlier. We haven't had a frost yet. Here we are, at the end of October, and we've managed to get through with out any frost damage. Go figure.
The big tasks that were continued and completed were greenhouse/hoophouse clean up. In the greenhouse, we started to remove plants that were either done producing fruit or had just one or two decent sized green tomatoes. Over the next two weeks we will remove the remaining beefsteaks and paste tomatoes and save the decent sized blush and green fruit. The cherry tomatoes keep surprising me. Even though a lot of the plants are done producing and I keep thinking, "this is the week they're done", they are still producing. Now, I'm not sure this is the week that they are done, but I may want to experiment with some pickled green cherry tomatoes. The heirloom tomatoes in the hoophouse will also be cleared out in the next two weeks, as well.
The urgency for clearing out the heirlooms is that we need to move that house and the one that had the peppers over their winter crops to allow us to sell a small amount of produce to Coltivare in the offseason. We were able to clear out the pepper house by removing all the viable fruit and then the plant material. Hopefully tomorrow, we will be able to move that house over kale and some fall/winter greens. Another small but meaningful job completed was to get some flats of rhubarb seeded. It was something that we tried a couple of years ago so that we could fill out our patch and have some to sell at the beginning of the season. It was a success, so I thought it would be fun to try again.
Alright, on to this week's CSA share. As I mentioned, we cleared out the pepper house of all the remaining bell and frying peppers. Most of them are green, some are full color and a few are suntan. Surprisingly, there were some shishitos to harvest as well. I left a few plants that weren't so diseased to see how they'd push through. They definitely proved themselves. If there wasn't cross-pollination with the other peppers in there, I would have saved some seed. Both the beefsteak and heirloom tomatoes slowed down significantly. I harvested some that will need to continue to ripen a bit but had good color. They will be a combined item this week. This may be the last hurrah of the paste tomatoes. The cherries pushed on through for a good harvest but we'll see about next week. Kale is once again the greens this week, along with hot peppers, rutabaga, garlic, kohlrabi and cabbage this week. I was hoping more would be ready but there will be a few napa cabbages. Lastly, there will be TC3 Farm Garlic Powder as an item. Prior to the food preservation course that Chef Amanda and I teach, I had imagined the farm having value-added products available. Now that we have the course, I am more motivated to make that happen. Over the past couple of years, Chef Amanda and I have honed in on some good recipes that we hope to have available in the near future. We do those in small batches and don't have volume to sample with many folks. But some things are simple and easy to do volume. One being last year's ginger candy (we may have some next week) and this year, I'm trying garlic powder. If you're so inclined to grab one, let me know what you think. It's made all from garlic grown here at the TC3 Farm.
Have a great week,
Farmer Todd