Heat is gone, school has started, by golly fall is around the corner!

For dinner last night I cooked up one of each squash.

I just needed to see which were ready! Some were more ready than others. This week you'll see a wave of fresh fall crops, like arugula, brussel sprouts, and winter squash!

The squashes are good cooked. Cut the squash in half, discard the seeds, lay it on a pan cut side down, in a pool of water. Use a shallow dish pan so it can hold 1 cm of water. Bake at 350 for a while, until you can pierce it with a fork and it's soft. The spaghetti gets its name because when you pull the flesh out with a fork, it's just like spaghetti noodles! Serve like spaghetti! The other squashes are great with butter and cinnamon and maple syrup mashed in. 

This week we've been doing some fine tune weeding on our fall crops, taking down tomato trelissing, and harvesting of larger crops. Our brassicas have unfortunately developed black spot rot, which is a disease that affects broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, etc during hot, wet seasons. Like this one. You may notice the broccoli you get in your share is a little paler in color, and might have a spot or two on it. They are just fine to eat! However, they will not store as well. So try to eat up your broccoli sooner in the week. This is the first we've experienced it (fortunately!) and it's very widespread and disappointing. It hit this weekend, last week we were pulling some of the best broccoli we've grown out of the field. With the super high temps it hit fast and hard, and now 90% are affected. We've harvested the best ones for you. After doing some research, we've learned there's not much you can do once you have it. To prevent it, you can get certified black rot free seed, make sure you cull all of last years affected crop, and spray with a lot of compost tea, which we will now do for next year. It's surprising to learn how wide spread this is- I've posted our problem to a facebook group for farmers across the nation and have learned that this has been a tough year for it. I've also learned that it is especially common in conventional, commercial farms, and that there are terribly aweful chemicals those farmers apply to prevent it. That makes me want to not eat conventional broccoli anymore! It may look picture perfect, but that comes at a cost!


Fall outlook: The fall crops are looking good. Salad mix, arugula, turnpis, radish, butternut, acorn, spaghetti squash, delicata squash, beans, lettuce, kohlrabi, kale, celeriac, cabbage, cauliflower, rutabaga, brussel sprouts, leeks, swiss chard, Jack-o-lanterns, other pumpkins...all right around the corner.