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Dear Friends,
 The relentless barrage of driving rain both during and post Irene changed things seemingly overnight on the farm from summer to fall. With a swift flick of the wrist, mother nature wiped away our summer crops a little earlier than normal. In response we brought their fall replacements off the bench.... you guessed it... a little earlier than normal. You'll notice as you pick up your share this week...gone are the "hot crops" (tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and squash). In their place we have a well timed planting of broccoli, some nice looking leeks, a bumper crop of celeriac, and the first of the winter squash (spaghetti or acorn squash).
This is the earliest we've ever picked celeriac and the reasoning goes a little beyond desire to have something new in the share. We have a disease present in the field called Celery Leaf Spot (if you remember that is what wiped our celeriac out last year). Celeriac stores really well so our plan is to harvest the rest of the field ASAP before the disease spreads and store it for the rest of the season. When harvesting it can be a little tricky to know what plants the disease has spread to so if by chance you cut into a celeriac that is a little pithy or mushy on the inside we sincerely apologize and encourage you not to be afraid to give it another chance. The crop is absolutely gorgeous so we are eager to get it out of the field with minimal loss.
Now that fall is here. We've begun some of our large fall harvests in earnest during this much needed stretch of dry weather. We started in the winter squash on Friday. For me the winter squash harvest is the mark of the beginning of the Fall. It is one of the more fun harvests that we do, in part because of the sheer volume of it. We break the harvest up into two parts. The first part involves breaking off or clipping the squash stems and then lining them all up in windrows every 12' in the field. This sets us up perfectly for the second part of the harvest which is by far the more fun portion. When then drive a tractor in between the windrows and fill up bulk bins with the bounty. Harvesting squash this way ensures that we fulfill the 3 F's of any good harvest system (now I know what you're thinking... there aren't any expletives). The 3 words I'm talking about are fast, furious, and fun.
Overall the squash yield is looking good with a few minor exceptions. Our winter squash was planted in two different fields. In one of the fields a small portion of the squash was infected with a terrible disease called Phytopthera Capsici. Phytopthera in Latin means plant destroyer... and it did just that to all of our sweet dumpling and buttercup squash. Some of our spaghetti squash and pumpkins were also hit pretty hard by the disease since it spreads in moving water in the field, all of the recent rain didn't help our cause. These losses were minor in the grand scheme of things as the rest of the squash, butternut, delicata, ambercup, acorn, hubbards, and cheese pumpkins all look great! We'll be bringing in the remainder of the squash early this week and stashing it away in our dry greenhouse to cure and sweeten.
The two remaining large harvests (aside from the multitude of fall root crops) are the potatoes and sweet potatoes. You already know that our potato crop is a little sub par this year but our sweet potato crop should make up for it and then some! The sweets are beautiful this year!! We'll chip away at both of those large harvests and hopefully wrap them up by the end of next week.
The switch into fall is a welcome change for all of us here on the farm. It is satisfying to see bulk harvests come from the fields and to take fields out of production and seed them down to cover crops. It is always nice this time of year to take a step back and admire what started last winter as nothing more than ideas, plans, and seed now transformed into food and smiling faces.
On behalf of the farm crew (Max, Olivia, Jason, Sarah)
Your Farmers,
Rob and Meghan (and Cayden!) | 
