C.S.A week 13

We were up last Monday in the Albany Town forest harvesting squash. It was a beautiful fall day, crisp blue sky, and a steady breeze blowing, keeping us cool. It was a collective effort, my two farming friends, their helpers, a volunteer, myself, and Ebyn, who has been helping us here this summer a couple of days a week. It was nice to have so many hands(and backs), as it was a lot of repetitive bending, cutting stems, stacking, boxing, and then moving boxes to the trucks, sorting varieties, then lifting into the trucks. We finished most of the harvesting and had lunch under a tree looking North over the fields with a spectacular view of South Moat Mountain. We finished up the afternoon by pulling back the vining and dying plants, so we could remove the landscape fabric we had placed down in the aisles to keep the weeds at bay. It was a tedious job of removing fabric staples one by one down each aisle, and then sloppily rolling the fabric up so we can reuse it next season. Although an initial and final time investment of laying the fabric and removing it, it made all the difference this year with the weeds. Last year, Kyle and I showed up to harvest to find we had to swat though a jungle of head-high super weeds just to get into the squash patch. Then we slowly made our way through swiping tall stems down with our clippers and smashing them to the ground with our boots just in an effort to move through and find the squash. With the trailers loaded and the field in the beginning stages of clean up, we made our way home for the day. We will be returning next week with a late first frost affording us the luxury of an unhurried sweet potato harvest.

In the share:

• Honey Boat Delicata Squash _ you can eat the skin on these.

• Some other kind of winter squash TBD

• Romaine Lettuce

• Bok Choi

• Lacinato Kale

• Carmen Sweet Peppers

• New potatoes

• The last of the red round tomatoes