Time flies, and this has crept up on me. I’ve known we were in countdown mode, but there were still things I wanted to do with you before the summer season closed. We have 24 signed up for the fall Farm Fresh Food Club and we are combining the Saranac Lake Village and Lake Placid Farmers markets for the fall season through December 19, so I have been planting rather than slowing down.
Thank you to those who have filled out the SurveyMonkey surveys. They are very helpful, and I may do a few more over the next few months to help refine next year’s program. I am very relieved that 100% of those who have completed it (20 so far) felt it was a good value. It was not as high a value as I would have liked because of the lack of salad mix and small greens. Next year!
One question listed a bunch of foods to choose from. Some of those items you did not get this year, but I was researching your preferences for next year. Some were planned, such as peas that did so poorly I ended up plowing them under. There were a few surprises in the food preference rankings, but some confirmation also. On paper, the plan was that you would get broccoli every other week and something else – red cabbage, green cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, etc – the alternate weeks, and that is what most of you want. So far the favorites, in order, are salad mix, tomatoes, carrots, spinach and onions tied for 4th place, potatoes, then broccoli, basil and garlic tied for 7th place. This is very good information for me. I had been told by other CSA farmers that folks want tomatoes, lettuce or salad mix, carrots, and broccoli every week, so you aren’t too different. I am mulling the logistics of offering a consistent “menu” next year from which you would choose what you want each week. We need probably 75 memberships to make your choices average out. For instance, 42% of you want arugula once a month and 42% want it each week, so if I planted enough for half of you to take arugula each week it ought to work out. The downside is that I don’t have “new” items to announce very often, but that is how it worked this year – once we had squash, we had the same squashes. Oh, and I have noted that though I love zucchini and the patty pans and don’t like yellow squash, more of you want yellow squash.
Other CSAs have reported that the biggest complaint they get is too much food, and of the three who said they would not be back next year, two said it was because of too much food. We have several memberships that are shared among 2 or 3 households. One option is to offer two sizes of shares, but CSAs that do that pre-box their shares so they don’t need to give clear directions on amounts for folks to take. I will consider a smaller share option if enough folks request it and we’ll work on the logistics.
Enough of the survey. This week – we have about a dozen heads of broccoli, and maybe more will grow a lot overnight. I don’t know why the broccoli is small to medium this fall. Usually fall broccoli gets huge. We also have Napa cabbage. I did get out last week (is it week before last now??) and spray the broccoli and cabbage with bT, a bacterial disease, to reduce the cabbage looper population. Those are little green worms. But when I started harvesting the Napa cabbage I ended up stripping great big cabbages into little cabbages because armyworms (not green) were making the top quarter into lace, and armyworms are not controlled by the bT. So, tomorrow evening, if you come late and find me with a sprayer on my back, I will be spraying the spinosad (an extract from a soil actinomycete). The spinosad is toxic to bees for several hours so I only spray it at dusk after the bees have gone in for the evening. But I digress – you can also have the Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage or red cabbage. If you request it we can cut you a nice looking savoy cabbage, but the savoy really gets sweeter after a frost so I hold off on them.
We have several nice lettuces to choose from. I am trying to think of the less usual items you get to choose from. Expect three tomatoes, legally vine-ripened, but they’ve been off the vine for several weeks now.
I harvested lots of the white beets this afternoon. They are sorted by size. I will probably just say take what you will use, because I harvested a lot. The white beets are really good. They do not bleed or stain, so make nice crudites, either just to munch or to hold dip. I didn’t like beets until I discovered simply roasting them, and now I love them. The shape is not always rounded, but the skins easily slide off after roasting. The nice rounded beets are almost always hybrids, like Red Ace. I grow Red Ace, and am not against hybrids, but “industry” controls the hybrids’ parents, while small seed growers can maintain the old open pollinated varieties. Industry sometimes drops a hybrid that we have come to depend on, such as the Butter Scallop squash that I love. I have both Touchstone Gold (hybrid) and the old Golden beets, and your really see the shape difference there. The pretty round ones sell in stores and at market, but if CSA members will accept more pointed ones, we can preserve some genetic diversity. The beet greens are also still really nice on this later planting. When I ask folks how they cook beet greens, the answer almost always is “bacon”.
I just realized as I ate a “baked” potato that we have not yet harvested any of my absolute favorite Satina potato. We will dig some tomorrow for you. These are wonderful, wonderful, REALLY REALLY REALLY good yellow fleshed potatoes. I think they easily outclass Yukon Gold. They are a patented variety so the seed potatoes are not always easy to find, but Childstock Farms in Malone grows them as does Cornell’s Uihlein Potato Station in Lake Placid. Under patent law I cannot save and replant them without paying a license fee, which is why they are not widely available.
I experimented growing a cutting celery this year. I am not impressed. The stalks are very green, and the flavor strong. I think it has a place in a small home garden for use in cooking when celery flavor is wanted, but it is not like the celery hearts in the store, and I wouldn’t want it on a crudite platter. It is by the parsley, and if we run out of either on the table just ask and I will cut more. Same goes with dill, cilantro, and basil. I think there are some dill heads right for pickling too.
We are in countdown mode on the chickens. Two more weeks of fresh chickens. We do have some in the freezer for fall sales. Then we will have duckling and goose for the holidays. We keep eggs in a refrigerator on our front porch self-serve all year too. A cat just jumped on the screen to get my attention, and when I went to let her in saw the eggs that still need washing, which is what made me think of the chicken and eggs. I have really appreciated your support and encouragement this summer. Thank you.
