Week 19

To close out the final CSA harvest week, we are hosting a work party to clean up the garden. Saturday, October 18th from 1-3, join us to clean up trellis, plant garlic and get the farm ready for winter. No tools needed, but a pair of work gloves is sometimes handy.

This week's harvest:

• potatoes
• onions
• leeks
• turnips
• salad radishes
• lettuce
• kale
• brussel sprouts
• carrots
• parsley
• cabbage
• winter squash medley

***Also, CHICKEN is available fresh this week! (Both stewing and roasting) And we have a few Thanksgiving turkeys left. One of us will be on hand to help out if you are interested in purchasing these DELICIOUS items.

Blue Hubbard artfully carved by John and Flora...it looked beautiful all lit up!

One of the questions that probably runs through your head as you leave the farm and bring the produce into your kitchen is why those lazy farmers leave so much dirt on the root crops. Storage crops, such as potatoes and carrots, need to have a protective coating of dirt in order to store well. You can keep the potatoes and carrots bagged, dirty and cool and they will last you the better part of the winter. They can't handle freezing temperatures. Onions and squash will also hold in a cool environment. Don't feel rushed to use the storage crops right away. They are keepers.

It is helpful for us to receive feedback from our customers about the CSA program. We have developed an online survey for you to complete. You can access the survey at: Survey Monkey . When we think about the season, there are a few obvious crop failures that we are aware of, including: summer squash and zucchini, broccoli and cauliflower, and chard. The corn, as always, had a few worms and one member complained of it being too starchy. The weather always provides for some crop successes and other crop failures. The season started with a 4 week drought, culminated in a month of rain, and ends beautifully with dry, sunny days and an earlier frost than we can remember. (The amount of rain we had put this summer in the record books) The weather blesses us, frustrates us and brings us to our knees. Drought we can deal with by using irrigation, but excessive rain is a detriment. Tomatoes, squash, broccoli and cauliflower don't fair well with all that moisture. The wet environment breeds fungal and bacterial diseases that stress the plants. Some of this we can overcome with succession plantings, other losses can't be made up. Certain crops require a certain amount of heat and daylight hours to produce fruit, making a succession planting impossible if the timing in the season doesn't provide for the appropriate light and heat conditions.
Our self-evaluation tells us we will need to add more lime and organic matter to the soil before the next growing season. We are planning for the purchase of a manure spreader and beef cattle to produce manure for us for the 2010 season. The advance into grass-fed beef allows us to provide more pasture based products to our customers, while decreasing the need for inputs from off the farm for the garden and in the form of grain to feed livestock. Due to the high cost of grain, we'll be decreasing the laying hen flock and the number of pigs we raise. We can't find a way to make them pay for themselves. The goal is to have the farm be as self sustaining as possible....animals eat grass, provide manure, manure composts and gets spread into the garden, vegetables grow, excess produce is fed to pigs...and the cycle goes on. You can expect to be able to purchase lamb and beef in the 2010 season.

However, for 2009, we will be offering only vegetables as we develop our sheep flock and our beef herd. We'll still keep a few pigs, chickens, ducks, turkeys and Dulcie, our dairy cow, but our focus will be on completing this sustainable farm based cycle.

This is a note from our friends at Wolf Pine Farm....if you want to eat local food throughout the season, consider contacting Amy for a winter CSA share. Wolf Pine Farm CSA in Alfred is collaborating with other farms to offer a Winter Share that begins on November 7th. Seven pickups, from November through February, will include local organic items such as winter storage veggies, greenhouse grown salad greens, and some fruits and eggs. Link to the brochure and application here: http://www.wolfpinefarm.com/images/2008WinterShare.pdf or just visit their website and follow the links from the home page: www.wolfpinefarm.com . Wolf Pine Farm will help Portland area shareholders connect to form driving co-ops to take turns picking up shares, contact Amy Sprague at 324-2357 for more details.

One of our favorite authors, Michael Pollan, was recently published in the Times and his piece is worth a few minutes of time.

Click here to read the article.You can also plan to hear him speak this month at Bates College.

As a final word, we want to thank you all infinitely for your kind words, support, volunteer time and great recipe ideas. Without you, our community, the CSA wouldn't exist. We farm in this community because we don't want to do this work without all of you. We love your weekly visits, your thoughtful ideas and your look of delight when you get to harvest carrots for the first time or beans for the first time since you were a kid. Thanks for a great season! Hope your winter tables are graced with a few onions from Broadturn Farm. Please remember to visit the farm, the pigs,

the laying hens, Stella

and us anytime this winter. The trails are great for hiking and skiing and the fall colors are a showstopper this week.

Blessings on the meal-

Stacy and John

Week 18

Sunday brought the organic inspector to the farm to review our practices, receipts for seed and feed and records about planting schedules, rotations and harvest yields. Organic farming requires scrupulous record keeping. For the last few years, we have based most of this record keeping on our computer. This past season, we started to use an on-line database system and Google Earth to keep records. When John is not in the field in the winter, he's at the computer "virtual farming" as he color-codes the mapping program with the planting schedule. We've been dreaming about how much easier this would be with the institution of i-phones for both of us and our interns so data could be entered in the field and communication could be easier between all of us during the days in the field. We could enter data from the field about what we are planting and harvesting rather than scribbling it on scraps of paper and transcribing them into the computer later in the day. Of course, Apple hasn't returned my phone call or email about sponsoring farm-based technology development so for now, we'll just keep writing things on our old fashioned "Palm Pilots", our hands. (Our idea of a palm pilot is ink directly on the hand...)
We still have some large garden projects left before the season ends which include: cover cropping the open garden space (see picture above); planting garlic for next season; cleaning up the tomato trellises; cleaning out the tomato house and closing it up for the winter; mulching the strawberry plants; and finishing the season's harvest. "Thank you" to two CSA families who joined John on Saturday to clean up the winter squash field--Thanks Cori, Todd, Justin and Erin! John and I both start to loose steam this time of the year and the appearance of volunteers and their helping hands goes a long way to motivating us to finish the work for the season.
The farm is starting to get brown and crinkled, as everything turns back into the soil for the winter. I'm ready to light up that wood stove and turn our attention inward.
People always ask us what we do with our time off in the winter... some folks are surprised to realize that November is really the only down-time that we have. December brings seed catalogs, and thus the beginning of planning out the whole season. Conferences, farmer meetings, and organic production seminars all take place during the winter-- when else do we farmers have time for it? We will be building a lot over the winter. Among other projects... the barn still needs significant work, we'll put together a walk-in cooler, and build a bath house. We start seedlings in late February and invite next year's first apprentice to move in by mid March. So November is as "down-time" as it gets! (and in case you are still wondering... in November we sleep!)

There are a lot of items this week and next. Don't be intimidated by the amounts here. You do not have to take everything, but many of these items will keep well in a cool corner of your house. Potatoes, onions, carrots, rutagaba (which is a kind of turnip) leeks, winter squash and kholrabi will all hold very well over the course of the month.
This week's harvest:
Broccoli
Fennel
Lettuce
Onion
Leek
Kholrabi
Daikon radish
Rutabaga
Potato
Kale
Brussel sprouts
Winter squash
Beets
Carrots
Soy beans (edamame)

Of course all of us involved in the CSA are friends of Broadturn Farm. But we are going to make that role official by starting a committee which will start out as a branch of the Scarborough Land Conservation Trust. The purpose of this group is to advise and direct the relationship between the farm and the land trust, as well as the population at large. We are looking for a handful of individuals who can serve on this committee. Benefits involve having an active voice in the direction of this property, learning--and teaching others-- about farm-land uses, and oh yeah-- food at every meeting. (HA! we know your weakness!!!)

Please consider joining this brand new group as another way you can support what we do at Broadturn Farm. Thanks!

Blessings on the meal,
John and Stacy