Farm Notes

After four months of slowly but surely growing underground, as of this week all of our sweet potatoes have been harvested! It was hard and tedious and dirty work, but thanks to our awesome crew + some very helpful friends, we harvested around 200lbs of tubers. While that’s not too shabby, I’ll be honest that I was hoping for a much bigger harvest. We definitely learned some important lessons in this first season of growing sweet potatoes, and I’m eager to give them another try next season.

Sweet potatoes take so long to grow (typically 90-120 days), and they produce a ton of green matter that takes up a LOT of valuable real estate in the main growing season. This means that sweet potatoes end up hogging a lot of bed space that we could otherwise devote to a more diverse range of vegetables. Sweet potatoes also thrive in soft, loamy soil with lots of organic matter, and much of the soil on our farm is still pretty heavy clay – which means most of our potatoes are super wonky sizes and shapes (as the tubers can't grow as freely in clay-heavy soils).

To address both of these issues, next summer we are going to try a totally different method of growing these tubers… grow bags! Grow bags are literally large bags made of plastic or cloth, which you fill with dirt/compost and can grow just about anything out of! One of my farmer mentors grows all their sweet potatoes in 15-gallon grow bags, and they’ve reported it works like a charm. By using grow bags, you can cultivate sweet potatoes without taking up precious bed space AND you can fill the bags with high quality compost that helps the tubers to grow especially nicely. For any of you hoping to give sweet potatoes a try, but you don’t have much space to spare, I highly encourage you to try the grow bag route as well next year.

No other big updates from the farm this week… but looking ahead to next week, we are planting our garlic for 2022! I’m excited to show y’all our process for planting garlic – it’s a super fun and satisfying plant to grow, and you don’t need a ton of space to give it a try.

Kitchen Notes

This week, our full share CSA members got one of my favorite fall veggies in their boxes… mini honeynut butternut squash! (PS – don’t worry to our small share folks, you’ll get honeynuts next week)

Honeynuts are a relatively new type of butternut squash hybrid, which have been specially bred for their petite size and super sweet flesh (if you’re curious about the history of honeynuts, there is a great article here).

While you can cook these just like you would any other kind of butternut squash, my go-to method is SUPER simple – just cut the squash in half lengthwise, slather each half with a bit of olive oil (or butter), salt, and pepper and roast in a 400F oven for about 25-30 minutes until the flesh is super tender.

Here are some links to a few other recipes I found using honeynut squash, if you feel inspired to cook up some of these lil cuties this fall!

Today’s Stats

Low temp: 58F
High temp: 78F
Sunrise: 7:30am
Sunset: 6:33pm
Moon phase: Waning gibbous
Additional notes: Another glorious fall day!