Summer Week 19: Fall Reigns

The men bonding while hunting for pumpkins. The pumpkin patch got too weedy for people to walk in, so the boys gathered them up and moved them to the farm stand for easy picking.

THIS WEEK’S SUBSCRIBER MENU:
• Carrots
• Tomatoes
• Sweet Peppers
• Spinach
• Fennel
• “Purple Frills” Salad Mustard
• “Jester” Winter Squash
• Garlic

Click on the links above for information and recipes about these crops.

COMING SOON:
Potatoes
Tatsoi
Mizuna
Pea Shoots

It seemed as though summer would last forever. Warm, sunny days and cool nights, with no rain. But inevitably, it turns. The frost comes, the rain rolls in, and the clouds return.

Soup season returns. Greens taste sweeter with frost, and the hard-shelled winter squashes become a staple food. There are a lot of recipes on our Squash page, linked above and soup is always a comforting, easy choice.

Spinach is sweet and hearty in the fall, and this week’s exciting crop—salad mustard is a winner! Try it in a sandwich, or on top of your cooked spinach or a soup. It’s mustardy, but not hot. Tasty and pretty. Make sure and try some of the fennel recipes—or just cut it into wedges and roast it with carrots. The stems are great used like celery, chopped into tuna or chicken salad, or just to much up.

The tomatoes and peppers are lingering on, they are just taking longer to ripen. It hasn’t been cold enough to kill the plants, so they keep on setting fruits and ripening those that are mature enough. Amazing—it’s almost November.

If you haven’t picked up your Jack-O-Lantern pumpkins yet, this is the last week—Halloween IS next week, after all. Starting in November we will start breaking into the Sugar Pie, Eating Pumpkins. Pie, Soup, Pumpkin Bread—they are all calling me.

The little pullets are about a month old now and have their first set of feathers. It’s almost time to move them to bigger quarters! Only 6 months to go until eggs.

The little laying pullets that arrived last month are fully feathered and past their most fragile stage. Soon we will move them outside, or possibly into one of the greenhouses. It takes about six months for them to reach maturity, when they will start laying. That should be about April, when the increasing daylength tells them it is time. On the opposite side of the calendar now, the hens have entered their molt—when they lose all their feathers to grow a new, clean set to get them through the winter. They are not able to produce eggs and make feathers at the same time, so there are no eggs to be had now. The long wait has begun….