In Your Share This Week
- Carrots
- Celery
- Chard
- Fennel, with fronds
- Kohlrabi
- Onions, red
- Peppers, sweet mix
- Romaine Hearts
Crop Notes
Carrots: This week you will be delighted by the Shin Kuroda, a Japanese variety of carrot. We grow these because of their unsurpassed taste and ability to grow so well in some of our heavier clay soils. You may still find some of that mineral rich clay soil clinging to the carrots even after they have been rinsed on the farm. Thanks to Jane, who calibrated our mechanical seeders this year, most of our direct seeded root crops have matured into gigantic examples of our vegetable crops’ potential. Many of these carrots are so huge that we needed to increase the amount in a family share to four pounds. These carrots were seeded exactly four full moon cycles ago. Carrot seed takes a long time to germinate, so we used a biodynamic principle to help with the process. By seeding close to the full moon date, gravitational influences help the carrot to sprout, usually coinciding with the new moon which then aids in the growth of the carrot seedlings.
Celery: This is the last celery distribution of the season.
Chard: We will be able to continue harvesting swiss chard until the first frost of the season, so just keep your fingers crossed. Most likely we will get get our first frost at the farm on a clear night close to the next full moon date…just a short 27 days from now. Could be sooner?
Fennel: This is an Italian variety called Mantobano that holds well in the field as the cooler night temperatures of autumn approach. So now, at its perfect harvest stage we are able to give you a good portion of edible leaves still attached. There are plenty of good salad possibilities to play with for your meals this week.
Head lettuce: Every animal on the farm loves to eat our head lettuce, so we are dropping the insect eaten outer leaves in our romaine lettuce patch in the field at harvest time, leaving you with gorgeous and crunchy hearts of romaine for your share.
Kohlrabi: The Kossak variety of kohlrabi was first introduced to farmers in The States as the “next big thing” that kids were supposed to fall in love with in school cafeterias across the country. Apparently this idea was a complete failure, I know I never ate any kohlrabi at school. There is hope however, because the children of the Rainier and Clatskanie School Districts say that kohlrabi is indeed a favorite new salad bar item and that they ate hundreds of pounds, collectively, from our farm last winter. Please don’t be too afraid of this vegetable’s size, just peel before eating raw or cooking like you would a potato. Kohlrabi can store in your fridge for a long while, in case it is taking you time to devour all of it.
Onions, red: We will be shifting from giving you an early storage variety called Cabernet to a long term storage variety called Red Bull. So you may have either or both in your share this week.
Peppers, sweet mix: Sweet Pepper harvest season is nearing its end, please enjoy while you can!
Field Notes
We have been transitioning our fields from spent vegetable acreage to cover crops that will continue to grow through this fall and winter. The West Multnomah Soil and Water Conservation District has been extremely generous in helping us cost share in this process of getting fields planted to winter cover crops. Some benefits of having fields seeded, like you see in the photo of the very green Cayuse Oats include, building soil organic matter, sequestering atmospheric carbon, providing beneficial insect habitat, vegetable pest insect and disease suppression, erosion control, preventing possible excess nitrate from seeping into ground water, and so many others
. An ideal seeding sequence step by step is usually as follows. Mow the leftover vegetable plant debris, apply irrigation water, wait a few days and then till the soil, wait a week or more until there is a thick cover of newly germinated weed seeds (like an huge Chia-Pet carpet), at that point broadcast the oats, then lightly disk to kill that first flush of weeds and simultaneously bury the desired oat seeds, finally to provide the best seed to soil contact, we pull a heavy set of ring rollers across the field. Ideally within a week or so we get a rainfall, if not we irrigate to get a well established thick green stand of oats.