17th CSA Week

It's the second last CSA pick-up for the 2013 season.  It seems crazy that its coming to a close already as the weather has been amazing and feels more early September than mid October.  I'm very thankful its been so nice as its made it much easier on the fingers harvesting.  I still have some pretty crazy cracked fingers and knuckles but it could always be worse.

This weeks large share has lettuce mix, spinach, tatsoi, carrots, parsley root, onions, shallots, bok choy, winter squash, lots of sweet peppers, tomatoes, broccoli and white salad turnips.  The grab boxes had leeks, parsnips, cauliflower, beets, kale, collards, hot peppers, dill, cilantro, purple and green cabbage.  The herbs are pretty well toast so I wouldn't expect any in next weeks bins except good old parsley.

Beautiful direct seeded bok choy

So, I was all set to give everyone a nice large celeriac.  It's basically celery root but its not really celery like we're used to eating.  Anyway, its been growing since early April and this was the week to harvest it.  I was really excited as its the first year where they sized up nice.  So I used my fancy carrot lifter to cut the roots off because they can be a real pain to cut with a knife and got to work cleaning them up.  Much to my surprise many seemed hollow.  So I started cutting a few open to see what they looked like and everyone was either completely hollow or semi hollow!!!!!  Every single one!!!!!!  There goes 6.5 months of growing for nothing.  Grrrrrr.  But as they say, the show must go on. Check out some of the pictures I attached to check it out.  I'm leaning towards boron deficiency.  Crazyness indeed.

Everything looked great when I started into the celeriac patch.

Yikes!!!  This is what I found when I started cutting into a few of them

The worst were completely hollow and mush

But on a happier note the broccoli and cauliflower today were lovely so that more than made up for the celeriac.

We had a great Thanksgiving at my brothers and ate our faces off!!!  Wonderful.

Here are a few pictures from our first frost on Saturday evening.  We were lucky that it was so late this year!!

Frosty tomatoes

9:30am and the broccoli was still frosted

Basil the day before the frost.  Not looking its best but still growing and green

After frost.  Basil is always my tell tale plant on the degree of frost we had.

The eggplant were still flowering outside the day before the frost. 

Tomatoes were still thriving outside.  Frost took care of them

I harvested all of my sweet peppers from outside before the frost.   I got so many!!!

Fall clean up

Still lots of broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage in the field