It's OCTOBER! How?!
The colours have been spectacular this year and once again we are grateful for this place, this view and this season!
We have just wrapped up our month long open house we dubbed "Farm-Hope". THANK YOU to everyone who came out! It was wonderful to see so many families enjoying the farm. The nice thing about this spread out "farm-hop" was that we had time to chat with a lot of you, which was really lovely! If you missed us, we're sorry - next year!
Updates on the farm:
We had another early frost, which isn't really early for us, just normal I guess, but seems to come two weeks before our farming colleagues. Oh well. We managed to get all the squash out of the field. And yes, our squash yields were surprisingly
awesome! Remember, the killing frost we had in June? We weren't sure we'd get any squash, but they grew back and produced fruit. Some of the butternuts were not quite as ripe as we'd like but we popped them in the curing box and they are ripening more. And besides, I roasted one of those not-quite-ripe squash and it was perfect!
We have had a tremendous turnout to our volunteer/barter work days. We are so pleased. We managed to get the majority of our potatoes in. Still another three acre of beets, radish and carrots to go, but heck, with many people, it goes pretty fast! We'll be holding these volunteer days for at least another two weeks, maybe more depending on the need and the weather.
We've prepped beds for garlic, now we just have to get through the tedious task of breaking 500 lbs of bulbs up into cloves. Hopefully it will get planted in two weeks. We've adjusted our fertilizer regime and hope to increase our garlic yields in 2021. I'm still thinking there's a market for farming-gear slathered with the slogan "Ah, but next year...!". We're group of pessimistic optimists.
Do you have vegetable odds and ends collecting in your fridge? Remember to check out www.cookwithwhatyouhave.com the CSA oriented website we've subscribed to, on your behalf. While she does post recipes with measurements, her philosophy is that you can fudge the quantities and sub things in and you can still come up with delicious meals.
That's how we approach cooking at the farm. For instance, tonight I'm thinking about sauteeing one of those juicy leeks in some butter, adding an onion and some garlic, tossing in some frozen tomatoes, a good handful of parmesan and a squeeze of lemon to make a rich, high fibre pasta sauce for my three year old who, ironically, hates eating anything green. I always like to sneak in a little cooked red lentils into my pasta for extra nutrition and fibre. Red lentils are mushy which is great because they 'disappear' into the sauce and no-one's the wiser (except for Robin who has a hounds-nose for lentils and doesn't appreciate them, but I'm cooking for a toddler now so add more cheese dude!). Anyway, that was a rabbit trail. The moral of this paragraph is : Don't let your food go to waste due to lack of inspiration: remember to use www.cookwithwhatyouhave.com!
Till next time,
Jess and the rest of our Super Crew!