Happy October, Farm Friends.
Have you ever eaten watermelon in the snow? This season has been a wild one for us, and somehow this late ripening of our Blacktail Mountain watermelon feels like just another round of the twists and turns of this year. We are still learning to grow melons, probably one of our most challenging crops, but also one of our most exciting. These almost didn't get planted, as we struggled to learn a new borrowed tool, finishing the bed prep by headlamp, and calling in help from some farm members to get the melon and pumpkin plants in the ground. A few weeks later, they were crushed by hail, only a few shredded leaf remnants, and some stem and roots remaining. Without that hailstorm, we might have had melons ready in a more, um, seasonal time frame. Like summer. But these, despite being set back several weeks, they didn't give up and we didn't give up on them, either. In our last round of winter storm warnings, we stomped through the snow in the new rubber rain bibs and plucked all the watermelons from the vine, piling them into a huge cardboard bin on a pallet, and parking them in the propagation house hoping they'd ripen up. This variety was bred for our climate, in nearby Idaho, and has been the most reliable one for us over the years, tough enough to handle our cool summer nights and oddball events like 3 inches of snow in September.
Last night we broke one open, while listening to the list of winter storm watches and warnings on the radio. As we prepare for another round of snow, and record-low temperatures, we ate watermelon, potatoes, and spinach. Fall and summer and winter seem to be overlapping all at once, and we're doing our best to just roll with it. As I write, Noah is harvesting a bed of baby spinach; he called to consult on whether to just cut the whole bed (yes). We have a long list of areas to double and triple cover, things to check on and plan for to try to get a few crops through lows in the teens. We have, again another list of what must be cut, even if it could get a little bigger, because we don't think it will make it through no matter what we do. We texted another valley farmer with a few more years experience than us, to ask if she thought storage cabbage would make it through; like us, she was trying to decide, and her text ended in "ugh."
So what can you do? Most people can't just don the waterproof gear and rush out to a farm to help bring in the harvest under the tight storm deadlines. And most farms can't train people how to harvest effectively on short notice either. So as usual, the best thing you can do is come out and shop, and eat this local food we've been working to grow you. We had a great Apple Day market, and we'll be there for THREE MORE weeks, through the very last Saturday of October. The farmstore is still open, and still bursting at the seams with everything from tomatoes (getting into those that have ripened up in storage, after being picked firm), to baby greens, to sweet frost-ripened carrots, sweet peppers, hot peppers, onions, and so much more. Because of limited storage capacity, we are going to start selling some of our winter squash today, even though we strongly recommend that you wait another 1-2 weeks before eating it, to let it fully cure. We hope to get our fall salad greens through yet another winter storm, but even if they suffer, know that we will have a lot of food, with all of the storage root crops, cabbages, hardy bunch greens, and more that we have brought in.