Week 19: Harvest Dinner this Saturday!

Before I get into Harvest Dinner details, there are a couple of important items to note. First of all, we will be open for regular hours (2 - 7pm) on the Columbus Day holiday this Monday, October 14th. Secondly, this Saturday October 19th will be the last Saturday that we are open for Pick-your-own. The PYO fields will still be open during regular weekday shareroom hours as long as there are crops to pick (basically until the first frost).

Now, onto more exciting stuff: the Harvest Dinner! We hope that many of you will join us this Saturday, October 19th from 4pm until 7pm to celebrate the bounty of the season so far (remember - we still have 3 more weeks of distributions to go after the Harvest Dinner!). There will also be a Meet the Cows tour meeting at the CSA barn at 3pm. For this Saturday only, this tour will be free for CSA members. Live music from Old Cold Tater and activities will begin at the CSA barn at 4pm. We'll have tractors, a hay bale obstacle course, bean bag toss, cider press (we'll have some apples for pressing, but you are encouraged to also bring your own), popcorn de-kerneler, and pumpkin and round bale decorating. When you arrive, you can also enter your name to win a special door prize from Le Creuset. Dinner will start at 5pm. This is a potluck event, so please being a dish to share that could feed 8-10 people. Please also help us to reduce waste by bringing your own plates and utensils from home. Around 6pm, we'll draw our door prize winner, and I'll say a few words about the season and thank our volunteers and crew members. We can use help with set-up on Saturday morning, 10am-noon. If you would like to help out, please email me at lholdorf@ttor.org or sign up in the shareroom.

We've been really fortunate this year to have such a long tomato season. We should still have tomatoes this week, but probably not enough for bulk sales anymore. This past week we ripped out our hoophouse tomatoes, as well as took down trellising and tilled in most of our heirloom and Pink Beauty tomatoes. There's still quite a bit of fruit on the plum tomatoes and the last slicing tomato planting. We'll try to keep harvesting those until we get a frost, but they may succumb to disease first, as powdery mildew and early blight have taken a toll over the past several weeks.

We got some great feedback last week on the Romanesco cauliflower. There's still a little left out in the field, so we'll try to stretch out one more week of harvest, though we might not have enough for every distribution day. I guess we'll have to grow more next year!

What's in the share: Lettuce, Greens, Chard, Bok Choi, Celery, Carrots, Beets, Broccoli or Romanesco Cauliflower, Cabbage, Hakurei Turnips, Easter Egg Radishes, Eggplant, Peppers, Tomatoes, Garlic, Yellow Onions, Potatoes, Acorn Squash, Delicata Squash, Pie Pumpkins, PYO Cherry Tomatoes, PYO Husk Cherries, PYO Hot Peppers, PYO Green Beans, PYO Corn Stalks, PYO Herbs.
New this week: Sugar Dumpling Squash, Collards, Popcorn.