Merry/Happy Everything!

This is the final week of pick up for Week A Half Shares. Next week will be the final week for Full, Medium, and Week B Half Shares. Thank you for joining us on this little Late Fall CSA ride! I think it's been a pretty good mini-season, and I hope you're satisfied with the bounty, flavors, freshness, and variety. Every year is a little bit different mostly due to the outside weather conditions during autumn, and this year was a pleasant dry contrast to last year's excessive moisture. By the time it turned wet again in late October we had already retrieved from the fields all of the sensitive crops. For the most part the tunnel crops can tolerate the extreme weather just fine.

One of our initial goals when offering the Late Fall CSA was to have a diverse array of crops to offer in the pick up room, especially fresh tender greens, and not solely rely on the hardy outdoor kales and storage root crops. I find cabbages to be a great middle ground, and love eating them all winter, but they fall victim to continually saturated soils and succumbed in 2018. It was great to have a cabbage/napa cabbage choice for the 8 weeks. Now that we have 4 tunnels to use for extended harvests of greens, and because we're not running a legit January/February winter CSA, we wanted to carefully distribute everything from the tunnels by the end of the Late Fall season. It seems that the 2.5 pounds of greens per week has just about kept up with production. We're now using about two times more indoor growing space then our first few years which gives us the ability to have these fresh greens through the entire season. Fall carrots were also something we didn't do in the beginning, mostly because we were just getting our feet under us during the first few years at Anchor Run and carrots are a difficult crop to grow in our soils. Timing of seeding for fall harvest is crucial because germination and early growth is much slower than their competitor, the weeds. Sow too early and weed and heat pressure is too great, so too late and they won't mature in time. We have since found the right time to sow and as long as moisture isn't too excessive a good crop is now reliable. I think this was the best harvest of fall carrots.

Overall I'm very pleased with how this Late Fall season has shaped up and I hope you've enjoyed the food. Please let us know if you have any ideas for future years.