The caterpillar tunnel and layers of row cover protected arugula and asian mix for your deep fall feasts.
Happy Thanksgiving, farm friends.
As you might imagine, a holiday centered around food, people, and gratitude is bound to be one of our favorites. It was challenging to lock down our own holiday plans (and there's still room for a little monkey-wrenching of plans in terms of winter weather advisories and other surprises), but wherever we end up, exactly, we'll try to enlarge our daily practice of gratitude. Mostly likely Noah will be minding the farm, as we just couldn't quite get everything wrapped up enough to leave with farm-sitters, and Mary will drive west to get some important time with family.
One thing that we are grateful for is that despite this wild ride of a season, despite the early arrival of wintery weather in fall, we have plenty for you to enjoy, in this final week of November. The farmstore is truly loaded, and we were able to cut and wash some of the most delicious fresh greens today, just before the temperatures dropped and waterlines in the packshed froze. We invite you to come out to the farmstore in the next few days and load up for your meals and festivities: baby spinach, arugula, asian mix, potatoes, beets, carrots, cabbage, boc choi, onions, garlic, and so much winter squash. And decorative gourds. No matter how big your gathering, you could have a mini-pumpkin at every place setting (and please do, our barn is a little bit too full of them).
Fall field mosaic: peppers, eggplant, and cabbages returning to the earth to feed the soil food web. We use our BCS walking tractor's flail mower to chop crop residues into fine food for worms and soil microbes. Depending on the current crops and next year's plans, beds will also get coverings of compost, straw mulch, and/ or tarps to help protect and feed the soil and prepare for next season.
For Tuesday morning, we'll have some of our direct trade coffee brewed up, roasted this evening, and bags of beans for you to buy and brew, too. We'll still be working to wrap up fall tasks, but we will take turns stepping inside to host a farmstore pickup from 4:00-6:00 this Tuesday, to help guide you to the best potato variety or winter squash for your needs. And Noah promises new-chicken-coop tours!
And finally, we also have stewing hens to offer, just in time for serious winter soup season. This past week we butchered our oldest cohort of hens, who produced eggs for a full year longer than we had expected (an amazing and unexpected gift). If you'd like to purchase some, please contact us (email is fine, or call 240-1050; picking up at the hosted time on Tuesday will be ideal, but we can also make other appointments/ arrangements). Birds are $8 each, with a minimum purchase of three, to make our pickup logistics reasonable, and with a discount to $7.00 each at five or more. Please be aware, these are truly stewing hens, birds who lived a full life of using their muscles to run, flap, forage, and eat all the things that made such delicious eggs. Cooked slowly and gently, they are divine, and will make some of the best soup stock you've ever had, but oven-roasted they'll give your jaw a workout. We can give you cooking tips and our recommendations for how to enjoy them. Noah says these birds are a small consolation for not having enough eggs for everyone in the farmstore--but they will help get us to that goal, by helping funding the newest barn and the next cohort of layers. Eggs are now only about 5 dozen per day (a low in the past few years) but with the rising class of 2020, a new barn and upgrades to the older barns and our management, we expect egg abundance to soar to well over 17 dozen per day sometime in February.
We'd like to close with a special thanks, too, to everyone who has brought us food, drinks, hugs, and high-fives through the season. From venison sausage to caramel-apple ice cream toppings to chilies and sandwiches or cold ciders in the farmstore cooler and a few surprising checks in the mail. We know that we are lucky; your collective generosity keeps us going, and we thank you.
Whatever you eat this week, we hope it's delicious.
With gratitude,
Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm
The garlic is in: planted into some of the least-weedy beds we've ever had in fall, thanks to our minimal-tillage soil prep and a little advanced planning and late-summer tarping. It's now tucked in under a layer of straw, pathways mulched with leaves, and we look forward to seeing these shoots peek up first thing in the spring.