14 October 2010

Arugula, Beets, Chard, Cilantro, Dill, Lettuce, Peppers, Satina potatoes, Pie pumpkin, Radishes, Tomatoes, Winter squash

I think my brain took early retirement. Unfortunately, it did not have the decency to inform me of this before I started trying to write the newsletter. So I have been sitting here for nearly four hours putting down pieces of sentences and shuffling them more or less randomly in the vain hope that somehow meaning will emerge. Occasionally I think of something to say—or think I think of something to say—but when I try put it on the page I find I cannot quite get a hold of it any longer and nothing will coax it near enough for me to grasp it properly. Not that this differs radically from my normal (by which, of course, I mean abnormal) writing process. But something about the complete futility of the effort this evening suggests that whatever cognitive functions I still had a few days ago have now departed.

Perhaps my brain took the frost as a sign that its work was done for the season. Lots of people assume that our season ends with the first frost. Our basil season certainly ended Saturday night. But basil is particularly sensitive. Just saying the word frost to basil can cause it to keel over. Most of the other crops out in the fields did not pay the cold much heed. Even the late tomatoes withstood the frost well enough for us to get another harvest, as you can see, and the pepper patch hardly suffered at all.

Frost is an odd thing. The freezing air flows like water. You can feel it running down along the drainage ditch by our field houses at night, and it does its damage where it pools up and sits long enough to burst the cells in the leaves of tender plants. The peppers were spared because we put them on a slight rise, probably no more than six feet above the early tomatoes, which the frost did in (a mercy killing since those tomato plants had already done all they could and were fading away). The north end of the row of late tomatoes suffered more than the south simply because it is near the ditch where the frost runs.

People also assume that we lament the loss of our summer crops to the frost. Our emotions are mixed. Nobody who likes to eat can entirely celebrate the end of tomato season. Nobody, however, who has spent the summer picking all of those tomatoes can entirely mourn it either. And it is not as though we have time to just sit around and moan because we don’t have zucchini. There are all those crops that don’t mind a frost to distract us from our sorrow, such as arugula and radishes, which grow better at this time of year.

Of course, this time of year does not last very long. At some point soon the weather will get cold and miserable enough to make life hard even for hardy vegetables, not to mention farmers. But I trust (for no particularly good reason) that weather won’t come until next month, so we will deliver shares through the 4^th of November. That means you only have three more weeks to give back all those waxed boxes you have been storing up to return en masse.

Speaking of storing things en masse, we will once again offer you the chance to order various storage crops for delivery on the Monday before Thanksgiving (the 22^nd of November). I will send out a price list next week. In the meantime, you can practice with some of the vegetables in the share. I think you will find that the roots and tubers like to hang out in a cold damp (but not wet) place, while the onions and shallots and winter squash prefer a somewhat warmer and much drier residence (based on that I guess I am more of an onion than a tuber). Or you could eat them.