Frost is on the Pumpkin

Season of zinfandel sunsets and great blank sheets of morning miasma dissipating soundlessly above the burbling streams that form the backbone of the Oley Valley.   Watch you don’t run over the wooly bear making its madcap trek across Lobachsville Road!  Or that wooly bear!  Or that one!  Yikes!  Now that tomato season has given way to radish season, the blood has begun to thicken and I have time to contemplate things like the mortality of reckless young wooly bears.   Ah, the luxuries of farming!  You will be wishing those wooly bears were cabbage worms when you see the broccoli in your shares this week.  And gladly would you run them down!  Hopefully we dropped cabbage worm- free broccoli in your share. But just in case, we gave you two heads each.  When we take the broccoli to Greenmarket in New York City, the sparrows descend from park trees to clean the worms for us.  Like you, they prefer their broccoli organic.  Anyhow, that’s how you know we didn’t spray! Dunk your broccoli in cold water to get them out.

Ok, to get away from wormy subjects:  We are finally getting around to forking out the potatoes that we abandoned back when the tomatoes started to bomb.  And it’s been such a phenomenal tomato season that WE STILL HAVE TOMATOES!  Potatoes, beets, broccoli, bread still warm from the hearth.  Make yourself a hearty warm meal tonight and think of us up on the hill as the wind swarms down out of the north to finish off the tomatoes and basil and eggplant and peppers.   Luckily we have lots of cold hardy crops and nine greenhouses still in operation to keep our ark afloat through the cold dark days ahead. 

Don’t forget our annual pot luck and pig roast at the farm this Sunday.  Let us know if you can make it.  

Tim