In your box:

–Cabbage

–Carrots

–Celery

–Leek

–Salad mix

–Spinach

–Turnips

I am aware that there’s nothing really original or pleasing about a farmer griping about the weather. But this is absurd! We haven’t seen the sun in weeks. It rains EVERY DAY. The thermometer is stuck at 45 degrees when it should be in the 60s. I can’t even see my boots any more through all the mud that is coated on them.

Yet, we still have a good quantity of crops out in the garden that demand to be eaten. So I continue to trudge out in our ceaseless rain to pick them and bring them in for washing. Washing, unfortunately, is about the worst of it. Our packing shed isn’t heated, and neither is the water I use to wash the crops. So harvest days now involve scrubbing as quickly as possible in frigid water and then running inside to wash dishes or find a warm radiator or anything that will give some blessed relief to my frozen hands. Ah, the joys of farming….

Some growing seasons I don’t want to end, but with how lousy the weather has been the past few weeks I’ll admit I’m really looking forward to next week. We do still have one more box of veggies coming your way after this week, and then I’ll quickly move into hibernation mode.

I do have a slight correction to make from last week: raccoons are not rodents. I mistakenly lumped them into that family last week when I was mentioning the widespread damage done to our pumpkin and squash field. This is important to raccoons, since it officially removes them from suspicion of eating hundreds of our squash and saves Nathan’s favorite animal from any blame. Based on bite marks on half-eaten squash, whatever ate all of our squash and pumpkins has large incisors for front teeth, which is a feature common to all rodents (picture a beaver). Raccoons have a beautiful smile with flat teeth in front, totally incapable of causing the damage in our field. They are also really cute and wouldn’t think of crossing me.

We have a couple of new crops in your box this week, both of which we expect again next week for our final box: leeks and turnips. Leeks are a close relative of onions and garlic, and are most commonly used in soups and stews. These have a deep, rich flavor that develops over the course of the entire season. Leeks are the first crop that I start in the greenhouse way back in late February, and they are happy well into November out in the field. The greens as well as the white stalk are edible, but it’s the stalk itself that has the richest flavor and works great in potato-leek soup.

Turnips are a great versatile winter crop that works in a wide variety of meals. Try grating them into a cole slaw along with the cabbage or cook them with potatoes and mixing for mashed potatoes/turnips. Our favorite use is to mix them in a hearty stew. If you try this, slice them up and add them at the same step when you would add potatoes. Peeling them is not necessary and they’ll keep in the fridge for up to a month.

Remember—next week is your last delivery for the 2018 season. For our Thursday delivery sites, we will be shifting your drop offs to Wednesday to avoid delivery on the long MEA weekend. Tuesday sites will receive their box as usual, and Thursday folks will find their box at their usual site and time (just a day early). Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about that change. Enjoy your last local veggies! We’ll have your final newsletter next week and then follow up in a week or two with a request for feedback.

Expected next week: Cabbage, carrots, spinach, turnips, leek, rutabaga, and Brussels sprouts

In your box:

–Arugula

–Bok Choy

–Broccoli

–Garlic

–Kale: “Red Russian”

–Onion

–Radishes

–Salad mix

Our growing season officially came to a close last Friday night, when we received our first frost of the season. We had good cloud cover to keep us from an outright freeze, but we still had frost basically everywhere on the farm. There were no big losses—tomatoes and peppers and squash were done for the season, so everything that died from the frost was not going into the boxes anyway. The frost will actually improve and sweeten the flavor of many crops, so the taste of carrots, rutabagas, turnips, and Brussels sprouts actually benefits from the touch of frost.

I do have some most unfortunate news from the garden to pass on. The large part of the field set aside for winter squash and pumpkins is an impenetrable forest for most of the season, with sprawling vines and no shortage of weeds quickly taking over the whole area. The good news is that I don’t have any work to do in this part of the garden after planting and one quick weeding. The bad news is that there’s no easy way to check on the progress of ripening squash in the field, and, as most disastrously happened this year, it also leaves the field vulnerable to small rodents with sharp teeth that really enjoy the taste of squash. I’ve always lost a dozen squash or pumpkins to rodents looking for a meal. But this year, it was hundreds. The entire squash field is a disaster area of rotten jack-o-lanterns, butternut squash with their guts spilling out, and hollowed out pie pumpkins. So far I have only found 4 squash that the rodents left alone, compared to 500 to 1000 that were eaten. I’m still not sure what would have done this—rats and raccoons seem most likely. Next year I will set out live traps to avoid this ever happening again, and clear a path through the squash patch so I can keep an eye on them as they ripen. But for this year I’m afraid it’s too late—there will be none of my favorite crops in the box this fall. But as we always say in farming, there’s always next year.

Even without squash and pie pumpkins, there’s still plenty of produce to fill out the rest of the year. This has been a great fall for the bok choy, some of which has reached a threatening size! I was able to break off some of the outer leaves so that the heads would fit in your box, but even still some of them are quite large. Hopefully by now you’ve found some good ways to use bok choy. All of our archived recipes are still on our website and I’ve included one more below, as well. This should be the end of the bok choy season, and we’ll switch to regular cabbage for next week’s box.

At this point in the season the arugula is well beyond the “baby” stage, but it does still work well in a salad or chopped onto a sandwich. You’ll probably notice that the flavor is much more mild now than it was last week—the arugula was well frosted over the weekend, and this causes a lot of the spicy “bite” to soften as the leaves sweeten up. If you still don’t care for the taste, it can also be processed into pesto. Our basil this year fell victim to disease much too early, so if you didn’t get enough basil pesto you can easily substitute the arugula for it. We like to make a lot and freeze it in small containers for use throughout the winter. See the recipe, below.

Thanks so much to everyone who made it out to our harvest party last weekend! We had a great turn-out despite the cold, and it was great to see so many old friends and new members out for the evening. We did have one child’s winter hat left behind—if this belongs to your family, please e-mail me and I’ll get that back to you with your next CSA box.

Expected next week: Salad mix, arugula, cabbage, carrots, spinach, turnips, leek, and Brussels sprouts

In your box:

–Arugula

–Bok Choy

–Carrots

–Head Lettuce or salad mix

–Sage

–Summer squash or cucumber

–Sweet pepper

–Tomatoes
We’ve been keeping an eye on the weather as we endure a really soggy transition from summer to fall this week. After a couple more days in the 90’s over the weekend it felt like we were back in the middle of fall. But after we pick up 3 inches or more of rain this week, it looks like colder weather will be moving in for good. The rain isn’t really helpful at this point in the season, especially since the days are shorter and cooler and it won’t soak in very well. The crops have essentially grown as large as they will for the year, so getting more moisture doesn’t help them too much. It just leaves a lot of mud to follow me around!

This week we welcome back a couple of crops we haven’t seen since fall: arugula and bok choy. The arugula hasn’t been plagued by the flea beetles that left it in sorry shape this spring, and looks really good. Arugula keeps its spicy bite until frost, so enjoy the sharp flavor of it for the next couple weeks. If the flavor isn’t to your liking, you can always process it into pesto or wilt it before consuming.

Bok choy has done really well with the heat and moisture of late, and this is about as big a crop as we’ve had with it. I do have another variety ready within the next week or two, so I recommend using this as quickly as can so you have room in your fridge. I’ve included the casserole recipe that I mentioned back in the spring, especially since this has become a favorite of our family. The greens in the recipe can be varied, and since the bok choy is so large you can basically chop up the whole thing and not worry about adding the spinach or kale (arugula would also work in this recipe). There are also some good soup recipes with bok choy available online that would work well on these cooler days.

The garden is still quite full of great-looking crops for fall, so at this point it looks like we can still plan on finishing up a 19-week season. This leaves four more weeks of veggie boxes after today, and the season will wrap up the week of October 15^th. We hope you enjoy the rest of the season! After that final box I’ll be sending out a survey to get your feedback on the year and look for ways to improve going forward.

A note for Thursday pick-up sites: Our final delivery would fall over the schools’ long MEA weekend, which is one of the few times all year when my schedule lines up with our kids and my wife to get away. We will be up on the North Shore as early as we can on Thursday, so my plan is to deliver your final box on Wednesday the 17^th. All of your other deliveries will still be on Thursdays—it’s just week 19 that will be moved up to Wednesday. Please let me know if that doesn’t work for you. I’ll send out a couple of reminders as we get closer.

Don’t forget—we have two opportunities to visit the farm coming up in the next couple weeks. On this Saturday, the 22nd, we’ll be having a farm work day and tour starting at 3pm followed by a potluck at 5pm. Please e-mail me to confirm you can make it so that we can plan out some jobs to do. Bring footwear that can handle some mud—it looks like we’ll be pretty wet all week and there will be no shortage of puddles to jump in.

We’re also looking forward to our year-end Harvest Party the following weekend, on Sunday the 30^th. We’ll get started at 3:30 with farm tours, yard games, and socializing with our community members. Around 5:30 we’ll have a potluck, so bring a table setting and a dish to pass. You’ll also want a chair and comfortable clothing. Friends of the farm who aren’t with our CSA are always welcome. Hope to see you on the farm!

Expected next week: Tomatoes, salad mix, cucumber or zucchini, arugula, celery, beets, garlic, radishes, and kale.

In your box:

–Fennel

–Garlic

–Head Lettuce

–Kale, “Red Russian”

–Potatoes, “Red Gold”

–Summer squash or cucumber

–Sweet pepper

–Tomatoes
The fall harvest season has a nice nostalgic touch to it. The harvest is bountiful, the hard preparation work of the spring and summer are over, and it’s time to take stock of the season and note changes for next year. But what I’ve learned the past few years is that fall is also about forgetting.

There’s a certain amount of forgetting and ignorance that is necessary to keep going as a farmer. If I remembered what it’s like to thin beets while surrounded with a cloud of mosquitoes, I’d think twice about doing it again next year. If I had a good memory of transplanting kohlrabi well after dark with the light of a headlamp, I would realize that this job is more work than it’s worth. If I could think back to the time I spent carefully weeding the green beans only to get an absolute dud of a harvest all year, I’d be tempted to give up the farm this winter.

But the purpose of September, and the harvest season in general, is to wipe all of that reality and replace it with the sheer ecstasy of running a farm. Of walking out in the morning in a sweatshirt and basking in a pure blue sky and no humidity all day. Working into the evening without even the buzz of a mosquito. And though the work still abounds, it’s the kind of work that paintings capture and children’s books chronicle—hay wagon rides, scouring the pumpkin patch, and bringing in delicious apples.

So long as we have September, I’ll forget about all the anxiety, mud, deerflies, tractor mishaps, weeds, and crop failures of the year. And in January, when I purchase my seeds for the next growing season, it won’t be the ceaseless rain of June or the humidity of July that I’m picturing. It will be a 70 degree day in September with a brilliant sky as I head out to the field to do the work I love.

With the onset of cooler weather, there’s no doubt that fall is beginning to creep into the picture. Cucumbers and summer squash are wrapping up a great year with just a another week or so of meagre harvests, and it looks like this will be the final big week of tomatoes. Enjoy them all while they last!

This week we welcome back Fennel for its last entry in our boxes. If you don’t remember fennel from the spring, it has white stalks, green leafy fronds, and smells strongly of licorice.

The whole crop is edible, with the leafy fronds a common ingredient in soups and baked dishes, and the bulbs used for stir-fries and roasting.  The bulbs can be substituted in any recipe calling for celery.  For a good starter into the world of fennel, try it baked: cut into quarters, drizzle with olive oil, and bake until tender, about 35 min at 350°.

To store: The bulbs will last for two weeks in a plastic bag in the fridge.  The leaves will go limp, and should be wrapped in a moist towel in the fridge.

We are getting close to our open house/fall work day next week, and we’d love to have you out to the farm! We will be gathering on Saturday the 22^nd at 3pm and we’ll work and visit until around 5:30, when we’ll have a potluck. Please send me an e-mail or call us if you would like to join us—we need to know how many jobs to set up and we’ll need a contact list in case we need to postpone due to poor weather. Jobs can range from easy (seated) jobs like cleaning onions to hauling compost and removing weed debris from the fields. Hope to see you at the farm! 952-353-1762 or foxandfawnfarm@gmail.com

Note—we will also be having a harvest party the following weekend, on Sunday the 30^th at 3:30. More details to come. As far as the rest of the season—I’m still optimistic we can stretch out the season to a full 19 weeks, which will wrap us up the week of October 15^th. Then the snow will begin…

Expected next week: Tomatoes, head lettuce, cucumber or zucchini, sweet pepper, carrots, bok choy, sage, and celery