Category: Farm Life

Welcome to your life as a Fall CSA member, the club of squash soup supporters, allium enthusiasts, root rooters, and hearty green heart throbs. It’s an eclectic posse of folks we’ve got here, unafraid of fennel and cool with kohlrabi (or so we hope!). The Fall season holds a special place in our woolen hearts. When Nathaniel and I started off as a wee lil farmer lad and lass we thought we may very well be exclusively cold weather growers. The cold season veg market was wide open, the foods were our faves, and it felt thrilling to picture pulling veggies out from under layers of row cover and mulch amidst the whipping winter wind. Some of you were there with us, up at Greenbank Farm where it all began.

Year one, we enjoyed a shockingly mild winter, allowing us to pull off a substantial CSA well into February without really knowing what we were doing. Beginners’ luck for sure! Year two, Mother Nature didn’t hook us up in the same fashion and instead dumped heavy snow for our last share of the season. This shut down the roads to all but four-wheel drive vehicles (which we didn’t have) and public transit. We proudly delivered shares up to the Coupeville Hospital on the bus.  A year or so after that, we had to cut our season off a week earlier than expected thanks to a six-day hard frost that killed even our heartiest roots under the thickest winter row cover.

Thus, over the past 12 years running a fall/winter farm share program, we’ve grown cautious about pushing the season late into the year. We’re admittedly also a little soft now that we’re more aged and our backs and hands feel the realities of cold weather. BUT- we are still passionate about farming this time of year! The harvests are so much less hectic without the slow-to-pick summer crops (we’re looking at you beans and zucchini). We don’t need to rush irrigation to and fro. And the crops are all weeded and mature, just hanging out waiting to be picked.

It fills the heart with elation to look around and see 600 cabbages ready to kraut, 800 brussel stalks begging to be roasted, and a whole tunnel of cleaned onions, garlic, squash and shallots aching to be masticated (I know, those guys are odd). We’re breathing easy, sleeping more, and feeling thankful for the cooling weather and shifting day length. Hope you can say the same.

As of right now, it looks like we’ll be just fine for our standard pick-up this week.  We, along with the rest of the Northwest were fired up about our first potential harvest in a bomb cyclone, but alas, we bunched carrots in underwhelming 20mph gusts and sideways rain. Catch ya next time, bc!  To prepare for the gusty guest that didn’t show, we, along with farmers throughout the PNW took the plastic off all our caterpillar tunnels, which was mighty adult of us, if I do say so myself. Normally, we wait until a windstorm decides to remove half of the plastic for us and then we go join in in a chaotic scene that is hazardous to human safety, but my, is it exhilarating!! We also pre-filled all our washtubs with water so we’d be ready to tidy up your share in a dark, powerless wash station, but that also didn’t need to happen. Lastly, we removed about 20 – 125 foot long sheets of row cover that were protecting our carrots from rust fly and our brassicas from root maggot. We once had a piece of row cover form its own ghostly tornado, take flight, and land in the top of an 80 year old Doug Fir. Not our finest hour. So yah, basically, I’m saying, we, like all of you, made some little preparations and we want a high five for it. Don’t leave us hanging!

Fall vibes are cranked to 11.  A season’s worth of carbon and solar energy has culminated into a bunch of roundish, delicious things. They’ve been reaped, cleaned and stored for the next several months of photosynthetic downtime. The winter squash is picked and artfully stacked in the greenhouse for curing while the onions and garlic are boxed, labeled and oh so orderly stuffed under our garage ping pong table. Hundreds of pounds and over 80 varieties of seeds are almost completely harvested, threshed, screened, winnowed, dehydrated and tucked into 4 gallon buckets where they may live in our entryway for the next several weeks, and proper storage racks for the next several years, awaiting their shipment to another random plot of dirt in the U.S. Potatoes are being dug and stowed away in garbage bins with a bit of wood shavings.

Out in the fields, the fall clover, rye, oats and vetch are coming up thick and green (almost looking like we know what we’re doing after so many years of patchy, mistimed cover crop seedings!). The sheep have moved off their summer veggie/cover crop paddocks onto a longer term winter pasture (our uncultivated back acre) so, as the daylight wanes, the fall cover crops can focus their precious energy toward growing leaves and not wool. Firewood is stacked, greenhouses are clearing out and the last of the hanging apples are quickly succumbing to yellowjackets and their ilk. Back inside, the meals are getting a bit less fruity and a bit more rooty as we revel in the season’s first rutabagas, winter radishes and parsnips. The barn is still a chaotic warzone. If it’s lucky, it may enjoy a few fleeting days of organization sometime in the dead of winter when nobody is around to appreciate it.

Mandatory August deep breaths. Will you join me? Breathe in…… breathe out…… Breathe in…… Breathe— AhhHHH never mind! No time! No time! Strap on the oxygen machine and go go go! Let’s see some hustle!  In preparation for .15 inches of theoretical rain, we got an early morning start to harvest 5,000 onions that could’ve rotted if wet, 225 ft. of cherry tomatoes that needed to be plucked for csa, and 500 feet of strawberries that don’t do well when damp (really, who does?).  That’s almost enough for a normal Monday right there, but onward ho we go!  We then employed gigantic silage tarps as rain jackets for beet and chard seed crops that are just ripe enough to be destroyed by rain, but not ready enough to harvest.  It’s a hefty job, but the details are a bore, so on we go through our Pinnacle Day for Productivity.  Nathaniel harvested lettuce and phacelia seed and threshed parsnip seed then headed off to another isolation plot with his bro to harvest plump umbels of mature carrot. Meanwhile Brian and I collected and processed millet, feverfew, scabiosa, and spinach seed to make room for new seed harvests to enter our seed drying caterpillar tunnel.  Our kind sister-in-law and work-traders shop-vac’d and swept up soon to be ripe nasturtium seeds from plants we grew in landscape fabric for easy seed collecting.  Brian sprayed coolers, lugs and pack shed tubs to get ready for Tuesday’s harvest and I shuffled irrigation lines around twice, knowing our predicted rain wouldn’t likely be enough for mature food crops.  How right I was… Now 8pm, Nathaniel and I sit on our bed with the door closed to muffle the noise of kids pretending to be kittens, while writing you this little note. He checks the weather. The rain passed us by.  Sigh… and breathe.