CSA Newsletter for Week 11

Farm Update

Fred harvesting apples on Monday night.  We
were able to get 14 crates full before we ran
out of light!

Hi everyone!  We are now officially halfway through CSA season, having finished up week 10 this last week!  Just a reminder that Labor Day is coming up next week on Monday, September 3.  We will still be having the Alma drop-off as usual, so if you have other holiday plans and can’t make it to the drop-off, just let me know!  If you let me know by the day before the drop-off, I can postpone your share and get you a double share the following week, or you can pick up your share on Tuesday the 4^th in Mt. Pleasant instead.  Now that school is starting and people are less likely to be on vacation, my guess is that we’re going to have a lot more people at the drop-offs!  Most days, we have several people who don’t make it, so we often have a few shares left over at the end.  That works out pretty well, because then people who forgot to come the previous week are often able to get some extra veggies.  But with fewer people missing the drop-offs, just make sure to check in with me first before you grab an extra share if you had an unplanned absence from a previous drop-off.  If you arranged with me beforehand to hold your share, then you should be on the list for an extra share, and you can go right ahead and grab that.  But if you accidentally miss a week, just check in with me before you grab double the following week, because that allows me to monitor our stock of veggies and make sure we have enough for everyone!

In other news, we finally got some good rain!  We are so thrilled that we didn’t have to irrigate at all this week, and the plants are definitely happy too!  On Monday night, Fred and I went out and harvested a whole bunch of our Paula Red apples.  There is a peculiarity about that variety that causes them to often drop from the trees even before they’re fully ripe, and once an apple hits the ground, we can’t give it out due to regulations.  Since we knew that they would probably all drop as soon as the storm blew through, we hurried out on Monday night and harvested as many apples as we could until we ran out of light, and we ended up with fourteen of our black crates full of apples.  So now that they’ve had some time to ripen, we’ll be bringing them to the drop-off this week!  They are delicious for pies, sauce, or fresh eating, and I’m pretty sure my kids have already eaten about half a bushel.  Also on Monday, Fred put in the first fall planting of spinach!  It won’t be ready to harvest for a while yet, but that will be the spinach that appears in your CSA shares in October.  We’re also wrapping up our huge onion harvest this weekend!  We planted a ridiculous volume of onions this year, and now that we have our wonderful barn, we have enough space to bring all the onions inside where they can wait, safe and dry, until we bring them to the CSA drop-offs.  So the last of the onions are coming out of the fields and into the barn this weekend.  That’s how I know that fall is coming; if there can be said to be a “harvest season” in our type of farming, this is probably the beginning of it.  We’ve brought in all the potatoes, we’re bringing in the last of the onions, and in the next month, we’ll do large harvests of beets and other root vegetables for the fall.  If the CSA season could be represented by a bell curve, then we’re just to the right of the apex, where the line starts to dip toward the bottom.  But we still have 10 more weeks of veggies to go, so here we go into week 11!

What to Expect in This Week's Share

If you are picking up at one of our traditional style drop-offs (Alma, Mt. Pleasant, or Midland), here’s what the options will be at the different stations.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose one item at each station, and if you have a full share, you choose two items at each station.

• Sweet corn for everyone!
• Potatoes or carrots
• Cherry tomatoes or slicing tomatoes
• Lettuce or apples
• Kale, microgreens, or zucchini
• Basil, cabbage, or green pepper
• Onion

If you have a prepacked share (Midland hospital, St. Johns, Lansing, Okemos, or home delivery), here are your options.  If you have a half share, you’ll choose either share A or share B, and if you have a full share, you can choose two of them.

Share A:                               Share B:

Sweet corn                           Sweet corn
Potatoes                                Carrot
Cherry tomatoes                  Slicing tomatoes
Lettuce                                 Apples
Zucchini                               Kale
Green pepper                       Cabbage
Onion                                  Onion

Recipes

It's starting to look like fall out there!  With both apples and kale in the shares this week, it's time to bring out a great fall dish, Kale, Avocado, Apple, and Bacon Salad!  Doesn't that name just sound like autumn?  Especially with the maple syrup in the dressing, this is the perfect salad to bring out on  one of the upcoming slightly less balmy evenings.  Enjoy! :-)