Another beautiful early autumn weekend, and another potluck and farm tour full of laughter, good cheer, and a pint-sized harvesting crew.  You can see from the photo that the patch where our winter squash sat growing all summer long has been cleaned up.  What you can’t see is the cover crop of barley and hairy vetch that we planted in the middle of last week.  With a little rain it should germinate soon.  It will keep our fields healthy during the winter by preventing erosion, keeping moisture in the soil, and converting atmospheric nitrogen into nitrogen next year’s crops will be able to use.  In the spring we’ll turn it into the soil before planting something new there.

Yesterday it was our great pleasure to be joined at the farm by some members of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church.  This community has been enormously supportive of our farm since our first days in the Richmond area.  Early this spring, we spoke at the church about our CSA program and about farmers markets — about the concrete ways that buying from local farmers keeps families like us solvent, keeps rural economies strong, and keeps urban communities vibrant and healthy.  We sell our vegetables at the Market at St. Stephen’s on Saturday mornings from 8am to noon.  St. Stephen’s is also the site of our largest CSA pick-up, on Saturday mornings during the summer and on Wednesday evenings during the winter.

It’s really quite impossible to imagine our farm without their support.  Thanks so much, y’all!

Fridays are always a big harvest day for us.  On Saturdays we sell at two farmers markets in Richmond, and about half our CSA customers pick up their shares on the weekend as we well.  Here you can see Claire picking turnips and radishes, bunching as she goes.  It’s certainly a joy to harvest on sunny, crisp, breezy days like this one.

Aaaahhhh.  While we love the rhythm of our normal days here on the farm, and thrive on the time with y’all at market and at our CSA pick-ups, it feels so wonderful when the twain meet!  It was a delight to see our veggies in lots of creative dishes, but a greater pleasure still to sit in the sun and stroll the farm with so many kind souls.  We aim to do this lots more next year — hope you’ll join us!

Lots and lots and lots more photos below!

A note to parents: I didn’t check with everyone before posting these.  If for any reason at all you’re not comfortable with photos of your children being on our website, just let us know, and we’ll take them down, no questions asked.

Continue reading…

A week ago Sunday we had a delightful and delicious potluck here at the farm.  We were a happy crew of CSA members, farmers, friends and neighbors … and the kids made sure the chickens had a blast too!

More pictures coming tomorrow here!

Until we get our irrigation issues sorted out and until we get a little rain, we’re staying pretty busy watering by hand.  Everyone do their best rain dance for us?

Fall is here!  We grow loads of different kind of cooking greens: collards, curly kale, Red Russian kale, mild turnip greens, spicy turnip greens, curly mustard greens — and that’s only the beginning of the fall veggies!  It’s a scrumptious time of year.  Join us!

We’ll post some of our favorite greens recipes over the next few days.  How do you like to cook your greens?

What a strange mistress is the weather!  While our friends in Georgia struggle with flood conditions, and our family in North Carolina say they haven’t seen the sun in over a week, things have been dry as a bone here at the farm.  You can see that from the dust the tractor is kicking up as Shannon mows our early summer squash and cucumber beds so that we can, in the coming weeks, pull up the plastic mulch and plant a cover crop to help nourish the soil over the winter.  The lack of rain is certainly a challenge, especially since we’re still working out lots of kinks with our new irrigation system.

As we do our best to manage a tough situation — hand watering our fall crops, for example — we reflect that this is a life we wouldn’t trade for anything.  We make our living growing vegetables that fill bellies and create moments of connection between family members and friends.  We are reminded every day of the land’s miraculous ability to provide for us.  We wake every morning blessed with work.

Our farm pooch is inspecting a bin of Cherokee Purple tomatoes — we’re in the last weeks of their season.  It’s always tough to say farewell to these jewels of summer.

But it means all the delicious autumn crops will soon be upon us!  Red Russian kale, sweet Hakurei salad turnips, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, broccoli … mmmm!  These are some of our favorite vegetables of the whole farm year.  They’re beginning to show up on market tables and in your CSA shares now, and you’ll see more of them in the coming weeks.  Keep checking in here for some of our favorite ways to prepare them.  Or leave a comment letting us know your favorite fall recipes!

This here is one gorgeous Small Wonder spaghetti squash.  Cut it in half, scoop out the seeds, and bake it cut side down in a casserole dish with a little water until it’s yielding and soft, about an hour.  Then take a fork and scrape through the flesh to get long spaghetti-like strands!  It’s good with olive oil, parmesan cheese, salt and pepper — and delicious with tomato-based sauces.

This here is also an invitation.  When the 2009 growing season began, we anticipated throwing a monthly potluck for CSA members, market customers and friends.  Well, somewhere between endless rows of tomatoes, hundreds of feet of irrigation pipe, thousands of pounds of potatoes, many miles of road driven to and from market and CSA pick-ups, and this whole fixin’-to-have-a-baby thing … that didn’t happen.

But we’d like to get at least one potluck in before season’s end!  This is late notice, but you are all very warmly invited to come on out on Sunday, September 27, at 1pm, for an informal potluck and farm tour.  Please bring a dish to share.  Little ones are of course very welcome!   No pets, please.  Please call or email to RSVP.  We’ll email directions toward the end of next week.

It’s a great weekend to explore the whole area, too!  Ride in the Heartland is an incredible event happening that Saturday and Sunday in Charlotte County, with bike tours for folks of all abilities, and lots of options for non-riders as well.  And on Saturday afternoon from 1-4, our friends Copeland and Christoph are holding an open house to share the incredible work they’ve done building an off-the-grid prefab house just down the way from Frog Bottom.  Consider making a weekend of it!

Quite amazing, really.  Something outlives its usefulness to you — but loads of little critters are ready to take over.