Last CSA week

A couple of the beds of chard.
They have provided so abundantly for us this year.
We love how their leaves shine in the sun.

We spent most of the day today harvesting. It is an overall more pleasurable task this time of year. I say this as one who does not care for the heat. And though it rained early this morning before dawn, we did not actually get rained on while harvesting, which is always more pleasurable. But we did get .29 inches of rain this morning and with the soil already saturated one would think we got about 5 inches of rain just by looking at our fields. We can't drive the truck all the way out into the field for fear of it getting stuck - or at least making an even bigger mess - even though its a 4x4!

All of the potatoes are out of the ground now and stored away safely in the cooler. As are all of the watermelon radishes and most of the beets. The only storage crop still left in the field are the carrots. We are leaving them in the ground until after we've gotten a couple nice, solid frosts so they can sweeten up.

With many of our crops stored in our walk-in cooler, once the temperatures outside start dipping into the upper 20s, our refrigeration system will be turned off and instead we will use an incandescent light bulb in the cooler to keep the temperature inside around 33-35 degrees. This will take some trial and error to get the temperature just right - we may only have to have it on at night. And then when it starts getting really cold we may have to put a small heater inside. But we learned last year not to set the heater above the "low" setting. One night when it was going to get down to 10 or 15 degrees, we turned the heater up a bit only to come out before bed to check on it and find the temperature in the cooler to be about 85 degrees! Whoops!

What to expect this week:
We will not have eggplants or peppers
We will have parsnips, cabbage, Brussels sprouts
Everything else will remain as it has been the last few weeks

Don't forget our Nov/Dec CSA option! We still have a few shares available!