We made it to the final week of the Summer Share deliveries. Transition is in the air. A very breezey, no-windy Monday harvest felt like change was happening. It felt strong and powerful and humbling. If you looked off into the horizon you would see leaves blowing everywhere. You see the tops of trees bending and swaying and shedding their colorful petals. The sky grew grey and the air temperature was dropping by the minute all throughout the day. Hats were blowing off of heads. It was exciting and sad and stimulating all at once. How lucky we are to be the ones out here on this ridgetop witnessing the change of seasons and feeling it all the way down to our bones. 
Our Monday morning crew in the sun before the clouds, mist and gusty winds blew in that afternoon. This picture is missing Heather and Kelly.
Always on Week 20 I feel gratitude. Firstly, I feel thankful for you and that you have chosen to Sign Up with our Small Family Farm CSA. I feel thankful that you value eating fresh, local, organic vegetables. I am thankful to have you to share this wonderful, rich experience with. I am thankful that you appreciate your weekly surprise box of seasonal goodies enough to lay down your hard earned dollars and hours to invest in this idea.
I am thankful for our little life here and to be able to raise our sweet little children on this family farm. I am thankful for our two girls who get to watch their parents working hard, getting dirty, and following their dreams. I am thankful they will grow up with an intimate knowledge of food and plants and their respective seasons and what it takes to really bring food to the table. I am so thankful that we get to feed our sweet babies the most nutritious and wholesome food we know how to grow. I am thankful they too will grow up knowing how to produce food and feed their families and share this knowledge with others.
Endings are really just new beginnings. The end of our tenth season running this little CSA farm is just the beginning of the next ten years. What will the future have in store for us? Imagine the food! We’ve come so far and learned so much and trudged so many pathways thus far.
This winter, when all of the Fall Shares and Thanksgiving boxes and Holidays are over, we will have a little time. We’ll have some time to reflect on this season and finish digesting it. Our little chimney will puff away heating our home and then after several batches of cookies, some snow angels in the yard and a little family trip somewhere, we’ll open up the seed catalogs and start again. We’ll look at all of the pretty pictures in the catalogs and use our experienced eye and descriptive discretion to begin selecting and ordering and planning for a new season.
A good, hard winter is bit like a cocoon for a farmer. We get to go inside and spin ourselves up into the underworld of farming. We get to have our magical transformation, read our books, do our research, learn from our mistakes, devise our field plans, revise our marketing and then, in what seems like just a long weekend, we emerge in April and spread our new and colorful wings again. It’s like we get to re-set our etch-a-sketch. We get to take out the garbage. We get to shut one door and open a new one. We get to re-start our computer. We get more data. We get a good nights sleep. This isn’t really the end. It’s just the beginning.
Week 20 goodies! Woot Woot!Brussels Sprouts- One humongo stalk of Brussels Sprouts. You’ll have to snap these babies off of their stalk to get cookin’ with them. They will keep better if you snap them off of the stalk into a plastic bag and keep them cold in your fridge off of the stalk.
Sweet Potatoes- Yep, Sweet Potatoes! Two pounds per member. Sweet potatoes are hard to grow in the midwest because of thier long growing season. Once they are harvested they need to be “cured” in an 80 degree envioronment with 90% humidity. We have a special little room on the farm that feels like a tropical rainforest curing our sweet potatoes. They will also continue to cure and sweeten a little more if left on your countertop. No need to put these guys in your fridge, they’ll sweeten up on your countertop.
Pie Pumpkin- These are cutie pie little pumpkins that are for eating! Cook them up like you would any other squash and make pumpkin bars, pumpkin soup, pumpkin ravioli, or whatever fun Fall pumpkin recipes are calling your name! They will also keep just fine looking adorable on your countertop until you find the time to cook them up!
Leek- Take a leek? Every part of the leek is edible, but the most tender and delicious parts are the whitest parts of the stalk. We use them all the way up to the tips where they start to turn dark green. Use leeks in your cooking like you would an onion as they are in the onion family. You can also feature them in a potato leek soup.
Bell Peppers- We picked our pepper plants entirely clean this week. We went through and harvested them all, green, red, yellow and otherwise with the real and final threat of frost finally coming this Friday with a low of 27 degrees! We loaded you up with the remainder of our pepper patch. While we much prefer to give colored sweet peppers, it’s time to give green ones at the very end like this before they get taken out by frost.
Eggplant- Similar deal here as with the peppers. We cleaned out the Eggplant patch entirely this week. Some were large, some were small. You may have received a small eggplant this week, but this is what we were able to glean from the remainder of the patch.
Spinach- A wonderful and generous .56lbs of spinach per member this week. There is simply nothing more wonderful and delicious than fall spinach to make a salad out of. It has been a great year for spinach!
Red Curly Kale- To add a little color to you life. We were very pleased with our kale patch this year. We were able to give kale more times this summer than ever before. The plants stayed so healthy and relatively bug-free most of the summer. 
Brussels Sprouts might be one of the more unusual looking of all of the vegetables we grow, but they sure are fun to harvest and delicious to eat!
Hungarian Hot Wax Pepper– One more pepper to warm up your Fall Soups.
Jalapneno Peppers- Two more hot peppers just in case you wanted to make poppers before they finally came to an end.
Tomato- A very modest giving of just one to three tomatoes this week depending on size. We cleaned up the plants and were able to give tomatoes all the way to week 20-something that has never happened before!
Broccoli- Beautiful heads of broccoli for all! Very nice and tight heads.
Parsnip- A half pound of parsnips per member. These hearty roots are great in soups or roasted.
Kohlrabi- A crispy and crunchy kohlrabi for snacking or a nice addition to your salads.
Butternut Squash Soup with Spinach Ravioli
