This week’s harvest: eggplant, peppers (chili, bell, poblano, jalapeño, sweet Italian, and wax), tomatoes, onion, parsley, kale, baby beets (with nice greens), basil, collards, squash, cucumbers, cauliflower, cabbage, coriander, dill, u-pick broccoli side-shoots and kale of course.

Wow, it’s official…winter is coming!  We’ve been running around all week gleaning what we can from the farm in preparation for tonight’s big freeze.  Monday night we even had 15 Fort Lewis college students help us bring in the winter squash, summer squash, cucumbers, and outdoor tomatoes. Talk about serious poundage coming off the farm!

Monday we spent most of the day in the rain harvesting peppers. We had left them on the plants all season in hopes that they would turn red, purple and orange, but between the colder nights and July hail, the summer was just too harsh for it to happen this year.  So, this week you’re going to get the entire seasons peppers all at once!  One suggestion: pickle the cucumbers, squash, and peppers together (see recipe).

As the season winds down we’re slowly transitioning into winter mode.  Peter is helping Chapman Hill make the ice tonight and begins work at the rink this week.  Reid is arranging trips to visit his life back in Portland and will work on a permaculture farm in Hawaii.  As part of my job at the Cornucopia Institute, I’m gearing up for the National Organic Standards Board Meetings at the end of October where twice a year I get to watch the government decide which synthetic inputs are allowed in Organic Agriculture.  All the Organic enthusiasts at the meetings always give me a hard time for not certifying our farm.  Maybe its something we’ll do in the future, but at our scale the cost of certification doesn’t make a lot of sense.  Plus, what’s the point of getting certified below our standards – even with how well I know that National List, there’s nothing on it that we need to use!  The level of diversity on our farm requires very few inputs beyond a lot of manual labor.

Winter also brings farm planning, seed shopping, and infrastructure building.  This year we’ll be constructing another hoophouse (for earlier peppers no doubt) and a walk-in cooler on wheels.  But, before that we’ll be planting garlic for next season, planting spinach in the hoophouses, cleaning up the drip irrigation and staking, collecting leaves down 3^rd avenue to turn into the soil, and going to the mountains for firewood.  The farm never really comes to an end, it just changes. And, that’s the beauty of farming – we experience the seasons intimately, and they change quickly here!

See you tomorrow afternoon!

Linley, Pete, Reid