In the share this week:
1 napa cabbage
1 bag carrots
1 bag arugula
1 bunch salad turnips
1 bunch radishes
1 green bell peppers
1 poblano peppers
1 lb yellow onions
Thoughts from Farmer Anna:
We have certainly gotten a good recharge on rain over this past week! It was a little wild here on Friday with the high winds and blowing rains, but we were able to get the harvest in before things got too crazy. The farm was out of power for about 20 hrs from Friday afternoon to late Saturday morning, but that was really just a minor inconvenience. My heart really goes out to all of the farmers in western North Carolina that have lost a huge percentage of the crops that were still in the field. It's hard to imagine such devastation and the force of will it must take to start the rebuilding process as the flood waters recede. Good farmland is hard to find and can be financially out of reach for many young people looking to make farming their full time career. The land that can be found is often either in some kind of floodplain (hopefully a not too frequent flood plain), is marginal land in a hilly area, or is so far from markets that the cost to bring goods to market can make it a deal breaker. We are so incredibly fortunate to have found our semi-marginal land when we did. While our property is 13 acres, we are farming about 2 of the best and flattest acres. There is a maybe another couple of acres of flat land, but we like to have some of that area in wild and native species to provide wildlife habitat and area for our kids to roam around. It's also tough to carve out nice, even beds on a gently sloping hill area too :) Farming can be a risky business with the unpredictability and increasing severity of weather these days. We don't have flooding risk on our hilltop farm, but we are definitely susceptible to high winds and the dangerous fluctuations in temperature that seem to be the new normal early in the spring and late in the fall.
All that said, while I am grateful for our recharge of rain, we do need the sun to come back out to prevent all of our nice fall crops from developing fungal disease late in the season. Luckily, it looks like we'll have some nice sunny days later this week. Hopefully the soil will dry out enough to do a bit of hoeing of all the new weeds that have germinated over the last few days :) We are also working on getting some of our empty beds seeded into overwintering cover crops over the next two weeks. As we move into October, we'll be focused on cleaning up the farm and tucking everything in for cooler temps.
We have more delicious greens and fall roots for you this week! The salad turnips and radishes are really nice quality and would be perfect to eat raw as a snack or to add as a topping on an arugula salad. The arugula is top quality baby sized, so also probably needs to be eaten as a salad green, but if you want to do something a little different, maybe you could try putting it on pizza with some onions that you caramelize:
We've already eaten a couple of napa cabbage here at our house. It's one of my very favorite vegetables! After all of the rains, the quality isn't quite as nice as last week's, but all still very edible and delicious. We've been eating ours in soup, fried rice and stir fry so far, but I also love it in a salad like this one that also includes some poblano peppers:
Have a great week all!