Farm Life Vegetables and Berries

Tipping Point

August is already drawing to a close and as I write these lines, we are sowing the last trays of the season, a series of leafy greens that will tickle your taste buds in October.

To think that we opened our seedling greenhouse in mid-March …and that it has been operating non-stop since, week after week, yielding up an extraordinary variety and number of seedlings to be transplanted to our fields, an almost complete array of everything that can be grown in our little piece of the hemisphere…

But it is my end-of-day tour of the fields, yesterday, that made clear to me that we had reached a tipping point, not in terms of what you’ll see in your baskets, but more fundamentally in the esthetics of our surroundings – a green no longer so green, rows  and alleys tinged with ochre, an early fatigue manifest in our solanaceae, not to mention winter squash whose leaves have turned completely yellow and dry as they pray to be relieved of the fruits of their labour that are now weighing them down.

Truth be told, the recent heat and drought have undoubtedly precipitated things, forcing hitherto lush vegetation to dig deep into its reserves to survive, to ripen and to produce its last seeds. I won’t complain. We will soon be harvesting winter squash and conservation onions, freeing up entire swaths of field which we will begin prepping for the coming winter. We’ll be in the final stretch soon, and the results will be well worth the effort.

A novelty in your basket this week: spaghetti squash. 
To cook your spaghetti squash, the basic oven formula is 400ºF/40min (having previously removed the seeds and basted the squash halves with oil)…from there, you can either eat it nature, or let your imagination run wild in terms of variations on a spaghetti sauce theme.

We look forward to seeing you all again.