Week 15 - Final Week for CSA Shares
A fairly heavy frost both Sunday and Monday morning confirmed that this will be the last week for the CSA season. It has been another tremendously enjoyable year for me and hopefully also for all of our shareholders. I am writing this update as I wait for the chickens to be processed at Wilcox Poultry in Brown City, and I am reminded of how many awesome people I have had the good fortune to meet over the past 3 seasons on the farm. Like Ken and Robin Wilcox, our current and past shareholders have been both supportive and inspiring and I cannot express enough how appreciative I am. The end of the season is always bittersweet, while I am ready for a reduction in hours of physical labor :) I will miss the harvest anticipation and the weekly shareholder conversations and comradery.
Not only will this be the last week, we have also decided that this will be our final CSA season. I have been provided an opportunity to return to the financial service industry that is just too good to pass up. As a result we will be shifting the sales of produce to a special order and on farm pickup model next year. We will continue to provide high quality, organically grown strawberries, blackberries, asparagus, peppers, tomatoes, etc., just not as wide of variety of items and on a slightly smaller scale.
Now, back to this week...several late season crops will be harvested this week, including turnips, Brussels sprouts, butternut squash, and a bonus harvest of spaghetti squash from a late planting that produced way better than I thought it was going to! We also will see carrots for the first and only time this season, while many crops had a banner year with the heat, they were the most disappointing item. We had 6 different planting and germination was horrible in all of them. I was originally blaming the seed but believe the real cause was was the heat and lack of moisture at planting time (lesson learned for next year, irrigate carrot plantings until emergence). We combined the harvest from all 6 plantings to provide this week's share. An excellent recipe that uses both the turnips and carrots is: Tugboat Turnips
This week's share contents will include:
- Butternut Squash
- Spaghetti Squash
- Onions
- Turnips
- Carrots
- Radishes
- Apples
- Brussels sprouts
- Kale - Blue Curled Scotch
- Sweet bell or banana peppers
- Cayenne Peppers
- Chickens
Thank you again to our shareholders for your support! It's been a great season and I look forward to hopefully seeing you out at the farm next spring!
-Wade