Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

This Tuesday, I plan to give you potatoes, onions, beets, turnips, squash, radishes of all sorts, Chinese cabbage, lettuce, bok choi, spinach maybe, broccoli, brussels sprouts, chard, mustard greens, kale, arugula, and baby greens of several sorts.  Remember that this week, you pick up on Tuesday, November 24, 3:30 until 6:00.  Then you can spend all day Wednesday getting ready for the big party on Thursday.

We'll also be handing out the turkeys to all the people who asked to pick up at my place.

I hope to be able to give you spinach.  It's still quite nice, and very sweet.  What I need is a nice warm Monday.  I have to take off my gloves to pick the spinach, so I need a few hours of warm and sunny.  If we get that on Monday, or Tuesday am, I'll dive into the spinach patch.  Otherwise, we have to put it off for another week. 

The brussels sprouts will be small, but I think they taste fine, so I'll bring in a bunch of them.  It might take several plants to get a couple of pounds (and you'll probably have to take them off the stem if I don't get it done), so wear some gloves that can get yucky and you can leave all the stems here for me to compost.

The mulch got out into the garlic patch last week, although I still haven't spread it over the rows.  My neighbor, Warren Stoner, has a machine that picks up big bales of hay and grinds them up and spits them out wherever you want.  So, I had him grind 7 big bales of alfalfa and drive along the garlic rows.  Hay makes great mulch and adds nitrogen to the soil as it decomposes.  Everything is going according to plan to have some great garlic next year.

My friend, Susan Jutz, and I hosted an open house here on Saturday afternoon, after the market, for beginning farmers to see some fall crops up close and personal.   We had about 30 participants, so it was a good, productive way to spend a nice afternoon (although I wasn't picking your spinach as I could have been.  But I was making the world a better place).   The chicken house is clean for winter and very soon the little ones will move out of the chicken yurt and into their winter home.  The onions and potatoes are safely stored in my underground garage.  The sheds are getting less cluttered, the manure has been hauled from the neighbor's, and all the root vegetables have been washed and put away.  That leaves only about 200 things left to do around here before winter hits.  We're making progress!!!!

See you Tuesday afternoon.  I hope you all have a wonderful and peaceful Thanksgiving.

Laura