Month: October 2013

All good things must come to an end, and as we start our last week of harvest and CSA distribution….

Thanks to all of your for your support of all of us here and what we do. This is your farm and we are very proud to be your farmers.

This has been a good year for all of us eating what the farm has grown. While every crop didn’t perform perfectly, as farmers we are happy with the season as a whole. This fall has been one of a kind. In the ten years we have farmed here we’ve never seen a September or October that was so dry and so mild.  The greens we have been cutting the last few weeks have been so abundant and such high quality they looked like they were grown in May, not October.

What a gift all of these greens have been. As winter approaches we all have full fridges and can eat healthy, fresh meals when we sit down to eat during our busy  fall days.  Trying each week to either eat or find storage for food, especially greens is challenging.  We hear you and this is our reasoning behind offering these crops in such consistently large quantities – we have it.  In the late summer we plant absurd amounts of greens for the fall, knowing that in a normal year many things will be lost to frost or the disease that come with abundant fall rain. Well this year we had neither and the greens flourished.  Rather than not harvest them at all, we chose to offer them to you. Many of you “old timers” who have been members for many years have learned not to take more than you can use, knowing that much of this overabundance will be passed on to the local food pantry or be added to our compost – which will nourish next years crops.  In seasons past we have also had folks not renew, feeling like “it’s too much.” Please understand that farming is a great gamble and while our experience allows us to beat the odds many times, if you don’t sign up again because we are doing our job too well – we all lose out.

Crop Diversity Blow-out

As you work with your share this week, making meals out of all of these different things please remember to use out website as a resource.  In the right hand menu bar is a recipe listing by vegetable. Each crop has at least two or three ideas and quite often the recipes include other crops from the fall -helping to make great meals with many of your farm ingredients.

What’s Missing

Amongst the bounty of many crops we have had a few conspicuous poor performers this year, butternut squash being the most notable. This crop was a total loss for us due to the heavy rain and heat of July. Other notes are less than expected yields in tomatoes (they tasted great) and onions.

Survey Time

Please take a moment to fill out our annual CSA member survey. We use your responses and ideas to shape the year to come and a few minutes of your time goes a long way to making the farm better each year. Follow this link to the 2013 online form.

Local Pastured Turkey

Our neighbors and fellow farmers Mike and Lucrecia Woodruff here in brunswick raise birds for thanksgiving. Our family has celebrated with their birds for many years and we are always happy. If you are interested call them @ 725.4554

Upic Has Come to an End This Year…

…

What’s in the Share?

Potatoes

Sweet Potatoes

Winter Squash

Carrots

Beets

Turnips

Leeks

Onions

Cabbage

Chard

Kale

Lettuce

Brussels Sprouts

Parsnips

Kohlrabi

The tsunami of fall roots begins this week with turnips and parsnips, added to the assortment of carrots, beets, celeriac and sweet potatoes we’ve been in up to this point. If you are feeling overwhelmed or even just a bit challenged by all these roots there are 3 simple things to remember. One, all of these crops keep forever in a bag in your fridge, giving you lots of time to work with them.  Two, roots go well with just about all other roots. You can roast, braise and mash your way into some pretty great meals on the blustery days and nights coming up soon. Remember to check the website for recipes. Here’s the link to the best simple roasting recipe.  Last, we have come into soup season.  Surprisingly easy.  Simply chop up your roots, sauté some onions & garlic, and then cover with water or broth, and simmer until the veggies are soft.  We use a hand blender to puree, sometimes adding coconut milk and Indian spices.

We dug the first of the parsnips yesterday and its been a long wait. Parsnips are generally the first crop we sow into the fields each spring, generally in early April. The seeds germinated very slowly -about three weeks, and don’t begin to look like something we planted deliberately until almost mid-summer. During this time they have been setting insanely long tap roots, penetrating about four feet underground. By the fall the foliage is bushy and about eighteen inches tall and the taproots average 8 feet long. Luckily we only harvest the twelve inches or so closest to the soil surface!  Yesterday we dug two 350 foot rows, using the tractor and a undercutting blade to get underneath the roots and lift them, making it possible to pull them easily.

From the field we bring them up to the farm and run them through the same root washer as the potatoes, carrots, etc. and then get them into the cooler, waiting for you to come and take them home at long last.

The End is Near…

Next week will be our last week of harvest and CSA for the season. It’s been a good year all in all. With a great fall to cap it off. Thank you for your support of what we do here.  We never really know what to expect from each season.  Farmers juggle so many variables in the process of growing good food.  We don’t take you, our loyal customers, our farm share members, for granted.  Thank you for being the steady component on the farm!

Sign up for 2014

Thank you for signing up for 2014!  We appreciate those of you willing to throw your hat in with us again this fall.  If you have yet to sign up here’s the easy link to our online sign-up.

Please don’t delay in signing up – once again we have accumulated a long wait list and will be opening that up this week to new members.  We truly don’t want you to miss out if the CSA is full next Spring.  Please be in touch if you do want to sign up but something is getting in your way (uncertain plans, share partners, money, etc) so we can hold a spot for you.

Pork

For those of you that missed our pork order or who don’t have the freezer space for a side will be happy to know we have hams, chops steaks and shoulders for sale in the freezer.

 Winter Shares

Wolf Pine Farm once again will be delivering their winter shares right here to Crystal Spring Farm.  We are just a drop off host & all the info can be found on their website: http://wolfpinefarm.com

Upic

Cherry Toms

Flowers

Herbs

What’s in the Share

Dumpling Squash

Sweet Potatoes

Asian Greens

Lettuce

Carrots/Beets

Kale

Chickories

Chard

Peppers

Red Onions

Parsnips

Turnips

Mother nature still has her finger on the hold button for fall with another week of crazy warm weather. The leaves are coming off the trees and the wind is picking up but the temps are still more like early September. Besides being quite pleasant to work in for us humans, the plants are soaking up this weather and growing like gangbusters. We have lettuce heads that are twice the size and weight of our standard for this time of year, kale and chard are leafing out with the vigor of our August crop and the grass in our pastures is keeping the sheep busy trying keep up.

While the leafy crops are a large part of our weekly harvest, we have slowly been spending more and more time sorting and washing crops that were harvested in September and are coming out of storage. Winter squash, onions, and potatoes are all taken out of the fields en mass and we work away at them each week, cleaning and sorting them for the CSA. One of our biggest tasks is sorting the potato crop. Unlike most vegetables, potatoes are sown each spring using tubers from the previous years crop. “Seed” potatoes we save over the winter are set out and the new crop grows from these tubers. Unlike our other crops that come from true seed that is the product of a flower and pollination potatoes are clones, genetically identical to the previous years crop. While we grow spuds for all of you to enjoy in your share this fall, we are also growing our seed for the coming year. The whole crop is harvested and when we wash them to give to to all of you, the smaller tubers are sorted out to save. Many years ago we were lucky to find some old potato equipment that sorts by size, sending the bigger spuds into our washer and the smaller ones into bags that go into the cooler. The cooler keeps everything at about 35 degrees for the winter -cool enough to keep the potatoes asleep but not below freezing, which would kill them. Farmers are like squirrels, storing away the bounty on hand for the coming year….

Sign Up for 2014

Thanks to all of you who have signed up for the CSA again for the coming year. If you haven’t reserved your share yet follow this link to our no frills online sign-up page. The process takes just a few minutes and provides easy options to reserve your share for next summer. If you have friends, co-workers and neighbors who are interested in joining we will open sign-up to non-members on October 21st.

Order Lamb for the Freezer

We have order sheets for whole and half lambs for the freezer available. Pre-order and have the butcher process your cuts as you like them. Talk to us at pick-up or send us and email for a copy of the order form….

Upic

Cherry Toms

Flowers

Herbs

What’s in the Share

Broccoli

Delicata Squash

Potatoes

Asian Greens

Lettuce

Carrots/Beets

Kale

Chickories

Chard

Peppers

Red Onions

One  morning of frost is a small price to pay for this string of outstanding fall days and nights we have been having.

We have been living it up on the farm these cloudless days. Getting all of our major crops in and slowly beginning the task of closing down the fields bed by bed. This time of year we transition from crazy harvest mode to long-term mode like mowing fields one last time, gathering/organizing equipment and strategizing where all of our stuff will rest for the coming winter. Bring the farm and all of its parts to a slow halt where we can pick them up and use them again next year.

The great weather is giving all of us the chance to dream we are still in living in the Mediterranean with eggplant, fennel, tomatoes and peppers still trickling in. Please make a point to prioritize these ingredients in your cooking so that you can soak up the last of the summer sun and it’s produce together this week.

Sweets

Sweet potatoes make their first appearance this week after spending the past 10 days sweetening up at 85 degrees in our curing room. This crop, like winter squash, needs to rest for a while after harvest to come into it’s full sweetness. These orange tubers like high temps and humidity to transition their starches to sugars. The process also helps them keep in your kitchen for longer as well. Our favorite way to enjoy these is to brush them with butter/oil and  just roast them at 375 until they are soft and the skin starts to separate from the flesh…

Much Lettuce Again

So much lettuce right now. All of our leafy heads for the next month are starting to come now so bone up on your vinaigrette recipes and get ready. Aside from all of it coming at once, this is a great crop and has none of the toughness that the post-hard frost heads will in the weeks to come. The heads keep well in plastic bags in your chiller drawer.

Many Thanks

We are so grateful to all of your who have thrown joined the CSA again for the coming year. There has been a record number of sign-ups so far and your enthusiasm has buoyed some tired farmers, giving us vigor to start the process of imagining the bounty another season ahead. If you haven’t reserved your share yet follow this link to our no frills online sign-up page. The process takes just a few minutes and provides easy options to reserve your share for next summer.

Pumpkins No More

After growing jack-o-lanterns for the past ten years we made an executive decision this past winter to drop them from our  list of crops. We have so many great memories of kids picking out their own pumpkins and the site of the hay wagon overflowing with orange was always amazing against the fall leaves but we felt we needed to take this crop off our list. For a couple of functional reasons this growing pumpkins has become tough to justify. One, it requires a lot of space, almost half an acre, and two, it is a huge attractanct and host to one of our more significant pests, the cucumber beetle. We hope this early warning gives you some time to find some local pumpkins before halloween is upon us .

Upic

Cherry Toms

Flowers

Herbs

What’s in the Share

Broccoli

Sweet Dumpling Squash

Sweet Potatoes

Asian Greens

Lettuce

Radishes

Carrots

Kale

Chickories

Eggplant

Peppers