Abbe Hills Farm CSA

Greetings shareholders,

This week, we have potatoes (nice ones this time), onions, beets, eggplant, peppers, tomato (or maybe, tomatoes, if we are lucky), kale, chard, edamames, chilies, and herbs.  We've been able to dig more potatoes and, while they are not disease free, they are much nicer than the ones that had been underwater during the big rains of two weeks ago.  We will be finishing up the white, sweet onions this week, and also the summer beets.  There are lots of eggplants, but peppers and tomatoes are being very, very slow to ripen. 

I will be cutting edamame plants for you this week.  Edamames are soybeans that are eaten green, and are a common snack food in Asia.  The variety we have was bred at Iowa State for Midwestern conditions.  To fix edamames, you quickly blanch the whole pods, then cool in cold water to stop the cooking.  Sprinkle with a little salt or soy sauce, then squish the little green soybeans out of the pods.  The beans are the part you eat.  They are great, kind of nutty and beany and green all at once.  They are slow to eat, but that's part of what makes them such a good snack food.  I'll be giving you a handful of plants.  I don't have enough time to take all the pods off the stems, so you can do it at the farm and leave the stems for the compost pile, or you can take the whole handful and let the kids pick the pods off the stems at home. 

We had a nice warm week, which was great for drying out the soil and getting plants to grow and make fruit.  But because it has been so cool and so wet for so long, most of the summer crops are either way behind schedule or dead from disease.  This has been the worst year in my memory for plant disease.  It's been on almost every kind of plant, and some plants, like the tomatoes, have at least 3 diseases at the same time.  You may have seen or heard the spray planes in the country nearly continuously for the last two months.  They have been spraying fungicides - poisons that kill fungus that causes plant disease - on the corn and soybean crops.  Strong fungicides, applied over and over, are about the only way we have to fight plant diseases, except for the resistant varieties and garden sanitation practices used by organic farmers.  Either way, diseases are tough, and in a cool and damp year, they take their toll.  That's why we have so few of the late summer crops that we expect in abundance - tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, chilies, cucumbers, summer squash, cabbages, beans, even the parsley is sick - yields have been reduced in every crop because of very serious disease outbreaks.  They aren't the type of pathogens (disease causing organisms) that can cause disease in us, but they really affect our food crops.  That's why you can assume that almost all fruits and vegetables you buy at the store, and even from some farmer's market vendors, have been treated with fungicides, even if the plants weren't sick.  Conventional farmers can't afford to take the risk of losing a crop to disease, so they treat just in case. 

So once again, the beauty of Community Supported Agriculture becomes apparent.  By your subscription, you are helping me absorb the risk of crop failure.  Because of that,  I'm able to grow your food without the use of dangerous pesticides.  Usually we have good crops, but sometimes we have a bad crop, but in the big picture, it works out OK, plus you don't have to worry about eating pesticide residues, and I don't have to worry about their consequences on the farm ecosystem.  Not enough tomatoes?  Eat more kale!!!!!   (OK, maybe that's a bad example, but you get the idea.)

Thanks to the volunteer potato diggers last week:  Cindy Strong, Maureen Boots, Sara Benesh, and the Coe girls.  We'll be digging potatoes again this week on Tuesday, maybe Wednesday, and probably Saturday, if you would like to help.  It's kind of fun.  In a weird way.

To settle last week's debate, I looked up the spelling of the word for the small, green, hot things we use in salsa.  "Chili" is one hot pepper, "chilies" is more than one, "Chile" is the country, "chili" is the soup, and "chilly" is when you feel cold. 

The fall crops look really happy.  The lettuce beds are coming along nicely.  Fall cabbages are as yet disease-free, and there are lots of daikon radishes, turnips, and beets.  There is a little bad news:  after 5 tries this summer, I never did get a carrot to grow, the spinach is skimpy, and I think the brussels sprouts are sick.  I had planted spinach, radishes, and greens the evening before the last big rain.   The rain really pounded the beds and washed out a lot of seeds, so I am redoing all those beds the first part of this week.  They might run a little late, but I'm pretty sure we will have lots of arugula, Asian greens, and mustard greens by the middle of October.  I'm almost afraid to tell you that the winter squash field looks beautiful, in case I jinx it.  Although we only got about 30% of the seeds we planted to germinate (remember the ground squirrels?), the plants are really healthy and it's possible that we'll get lots of winter squash from them.  We've got the soil fertility, the bees, the moisture, the sunshine - everything seems good, so that leaves only about 5000 other things that can go wrong before we start harvest at the beginning of October!  Hope for the best.

Here is a link to a whole page of articles on local food http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/theme-guide-food-for-everyone  .  And a link to a story in the NYT about a new food-labeling campaign dreamed up by the food manufacturers  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/05/business/05smart.html?_r=1  .  You're going to love this one.  And one to this month's issue of "The Nation", all about food http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921  .   

Have a safe holiday,

Laura