Farewell CSA

These cabbages took forever to head up. We planted them the beginning of August and finally had just enough full heads to give them out for the last pick up. I love how striking they are. Just thought this an appropriate "title" picture for this post.

On Tuesday, December 15, we had our final CSA pick up for the year. It was a cold day, staying in the low 30s for the entire harvest (8am-2pm) and through the pick up (4-6pm). The wind pushed our cold, wet hands past the numb stage, and straight to aching pain. Even after several good freezes, we still managed to come up with a pretty nice harvest list for our last pick up. It looked something like this:
-Winter Squash (sweet dumplin or carnival)
-Sweet Potatoes
-Red Potatoes (still can't believe these stored so well...in a cave)
-Rutabaga
-Radish (chinese rose and daikon)
-Beets
-Carrots
-Chard (large bunches)
-Salad Mix (lettuce, mizuna, arugula, spinach)
-Celery (all you want)
-Amber Turnips
-Parsley (all you want)
-Garlic (all you want)

All this stuff looked pretty good washed, bunched, or bagged, and made for a nice end to the season. The salad mix was the only foolish idea I took on, and I only went through with it because it was the last pick up. Our row covers, the two keeping the lettuce warm enough to live in December, blew off Monday night, freezing almost all of the lettuce to a non-recoverable state. Realizing this Tuesday morning after putting Salad mix on the harvest list, I had to scrounge around to find enough small leaves to make it happen. I ended up robbing the super-late transplanting of fall lettuce, cutting the top growth off of the 200 or so lettuce plants that were to feed us this winter...
We cut all the Spinach, Mizuna, and Arugula and took it up to my house where we double washed, and hand spun the 50 bags of salad mix. Catie did most of the work, and it still took us hours. Never try to accomplish post-harvest-handling projects that you just aren't set up to do. Here's the hard & heavy veg table (things you don't want on top of greens). Wish I had a shot of the greens table.

Anyway, it was a fun pick up, despite the cold, and lots of folks gathered under the shed to hang out after getting their food. Several CSA members stayed for dinner after the farm pick up ended, and even some barefoot guy named Jeff showed up for dinner and a great end-of-season jam.

So the CSA season is now officially over. Where's the relief?! Now I actually have to start addressing all of the things that I planned to "get to in the winter".

What an incredible season, what incredible people...what a bunch of miracles.

(stay tuned for special Farewell Buddy addition coming soon)