Enrollment in the 2012 CSA season is now open! Please complete the enrollment form (click link to download) and follow the instructions for sending payment.  There are a limited number of available shares, and we will return any forms received after we reach the limit.  Please read the Member Info and About the CSA pages on the website for FAQs and other details.

Reminder to RSVP to our Tapas and Wine Harvest Celebration! Saturday Nov 12th, 6pm. Please check your email for the invitation link and RSVP. Hope to see you there! Please bring a small dish to share.

Finally, an opportunity to contribute to Farmer John and his ‘above and beyond’ attitude. There will be a donation box at Weds 11/9′s pick-up along with some Thank You cards to sign. John will hopefully be at this weekend’s Tapas party and we’ll present that collective gift card and any other tokens of thanks you’d like to give there. (Thanks to Simon and Jennifer for coordinating this!)

Well, there just doesn’t seem to be any limit to the kind of crazy weather that Mother Nature can throw at us these days!   We got about 14 inches of snow from the storm and experienced two nights of frigid temperatures; 19 degrees last Sunday night. The low temperatures did the most damage, the snow actually protected most of the shorter crops, insulating them from the extremely cold air.

We harvested everything we could that I thought would be damaged Friday, Saturday morning, and the again on Sunday afternoon. We had to cut all the cauliflower that was beginning to head, even at a very small size. With cauliflower the leafy part of the plant can withstand the cold, but the head freezes and is ruined. Broccoli is similar but the head can stand lower temperatures.  We cut all of the larger broccoli but most were too small and I hoped they would make it; alas they did not.  We still have two more planting of broccoli that had not begun to head and which should produce in the next few weeks. We also still have some yellow cauliflower that has yet to head.

Medium size lettuce that was a week or two from harvest had the outside leaves plastered to the ground by the snow, exposing the inner heart to the cold- ruined.  The chard and the beet tops were also decimated by the frigid air and will likely not recover.  The bok choy that I was planning to distribute this week survived relatively unscathed as did the kale and the spinach.

We lost power on Saturday and did not have service restored until Friday, but were able to run the heat and the well pump on a generator I bought in the week after Irene. Thanks for everyone’s kind thoughts!

Celebrate our 2011 harvest – and our seventh year as OLC’s Community Supported Agriculture program.  Members should have received an invite by email.

Bring your favorite appetizers & finger foods to share at our wine tasting.

The event is from 6:00 to 8:00 PM so you can spend time with your fellow CSA members before your evening activities.

Free for CSA members; $5 for guests.

Please tell us if you can come early at 4:00 to help set up, or can stay to help clean up.

As for snow, we received about 10 inches of snow at the farm and lost power Saturday evening. We harvested everything we thought might have been lost prior to the storm. I expect the snow to melt fairly quickly and the greens beneath the snow to be in relatively good shape. We have a fair amount of stuff ready for delivery so the shares will arrive without interruption.

I am writing from a motel in PA where I needed to come to pickup some soil ammendments for the garlic and cover crop seed. I decided to head out on Sunday night and combine the trip with a hot shower! I will try to write a full update once power is restored and I can assess the state of the crops in the field…

With the exception of some heavy rain on Thursday, the past week of weather was more or less beneficial. The temperatures remain balmy and the winds that followed the rain have helped to dry out the fields a bit. We still have some very soggy spots in the fields, making it a challenge to plant the winter cover crop. We are likely to have our first frost this next week with a hard freeze predicted as we head into November.  At this point most of the crops that remain are cold hardy so except for the peppers, a few cold nights won’t affect us much.

We will be harvesting and distributing the Vermont Cranberry beans this week. These are a shell bean, not a string bean, so please don’t try to eat the pods! I am told by one of my market customers that they are delicious with sausage or they can be used in soup. We will have celery root as our root vegetable this week (you know I have to throw you a curve ball once in a while!).  It can be grated and eaten raw, boiled and pureed, or cubed and added to your soup. The celery like stalks can be used to make stock (celery stalk stock?).  We have a tremendous harvest of sweet potatoes so we will be sending more in your share for this week. This time it will be a white variety, which is very sweet but a little drier than the orange type. Enjoy!

It was another week of mild temperatures and the rain that was predicted, fortunately did not amount to much.  The fields are still very soggy and I am a bit worried about how I will plant my cover crops and prepare the beds to plant next season’s garlic crop. There is not much rain forecast for the next ten days and the breezy conditions are helpful in drying out the ground, so hopefully there will be a window of opportunity soon.

We have finished harvesting the potato crop, which is a relief. We did lose a substantial amount to rot in the low laying areas. We have enough to ship potatoes in the shares twice more for this year. We have begun digging the sweet potatoes and the harvest is a bit better than it appeared at first. While they are not as large as last season, the yields are good and the quality of most of the tubers is excellent. We do have some of the orange variety which came out of low areas that has some issues. We will be shipping these out first as they will not store well. Peel away the bad spots and eat them promptly. We are in the process of curing the rest of the crop which requires keeping them for 4-5 days at 95 degrees. This enables them to be stored and improves the eating quality. Expect to receive sweet potatoes 2 or 3 more times during the remainder of the season.

We have come to the end of the string bean season and we are still waiting for the Vermont Cranberry beans to mature. We may have enough green beans for one more round but more likely we will have to include them as an “extra” this week. We have begun to harvest the fall carrot crop and they look very nice and should be fairly sweet. We have red cabbage, but due to flooding losses not enough for all members, so we will offer it as a choice with green or Napa cabbage. We also have affair amount of nice escarole, but again, not enough for all members (a consequence of deer damage). We will offer it as a choice with kale. Enjoy!