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!

Farm Notes

Goodness gracious, it feels like we are farming in the rainforest! The past week has been wildly hot and humid and wet, and it hasn’t been the most pleasant weather for farming… but that’s just summer here in North Carolina, and we can’t complain about all the gorgeous veggies that are starting to flow in from our garden. Zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, eggplant, etc have arrived, and so have the days of needing to harvest daily to keep up with all the abundance.

We officially held the last farmstand of the season this week, and next week we begin our Summer CSA! I’m beyond grateful for all the support from our community as we make this shift mid-season, which will really help me lighten and streamline my workload as we prepare to grow our family this fall. Our first official week of the CSA looks like it will be a delicious one… with a new crop of looseleaf lettuce, zucchini, onions, cherry tomatoes, new potatoes and lots more on the harvest list.

Yesterday we planted sweet potatoes, and it’s my first time ever growing them! When growing sweet potatoes, you plant what’s known as a ‘slip’ – which typically need to be ordered from your local farm/garden supply store. We got ours from our favorite local farm store in Pittsboro, Country Farm & Home. There are lots of different sweet potato varieties out there, and I had to practice some serious self control to not try them all! We ended up planting just two varieties: Beauregard and NC-122 (for a full list of different varieties and their characteristics, here’s a great resource).

A few additional notes about planting sweet potatoes:

Sweet potatoes prefer loose, well-drained soil for best results. If you have clay soil or drainage problems, work in lots of compost or other organic matter and make raised beds, hills, or planting ridges approximately 8 inches high.
Plant your slips at least 4-6 inches deep, spaced about 12” apart in rows at least 3 feet apart, to make room for all the sprawling vines! Water newly planted slips immediately and keep the soil moist for at least the first week as roots develop.
Sweet potatoes like the soil to be quite warm, so we planted ours under black landscape fabric (which also helps keep down weed pressure) though you can certainly plant them directly in your garden without the use of any fabric.
Time to practice some patience! Sweet potatoes take 3-4 months to mature, so we plan to harvest these in October/November. I’ll keep y’all posted on their progress!

Kitchen Notes

If you live in the south east/mid-atlantic region, chances are that Elderberry bushes are in bloom on roadsides all around you! Elderberries are a spreading shrub grows to be about 8-10 feet and with a spray of creamy-white flowers in mid-summer, giving way to loose clusters of delicious black fruits that are high in nutrients and antioxidants, which have long been used by Native Americans for all their medicinal properties.

Every year around this time, I can be found scurrying along the sides of the road to collect the fragrant blooms, which I soak in simple syrup to made a fabulous elderflower syrup that I look forward to every summer.

Elderflower syrup is delicious stirred into a glass of cold club soda or ginger beer for a refreshing, non-alcoholic spritzer, and it is also divine added to a glass of sparkling wine or your favorite gin or vodka cocktail. I also enjoy drizzling it over fresh fruit, fruit sorbet, or over some tangy greek yogurt.

The syrup is super simple to make at home, here’s the recipe I used, adapted from the blog Lemon & Olive Oil.

Elderflower Syrup

INGREDIENTS

3 packed cups elderflower blooms
1 organic lemon, sliced
2 cups granulated sugar
2 cups filtered water
1/4 teaspoon citric acid or 1 tablespoon lemon juice

INSTRUCTIONS

Trim stems of the elderflower blooms, getting as close to the base of the florets as possible (the stems are mildly toxic and, while a few won’t hurt, you definitely want to get rid of as much as possible). Make sure there aren’t any bugs hiding in your blooms!
Place the flowers in a clean quart-sized mason jar, along with the slices of lemon.
In a saucepan, heat sugar and water together until simmering and sugar is completely dissolved. Stir in citric acid or lemon juice.
Pour warm syrup over flowers. Cover the jar with a cloth or paper towel (with a rubber band around it to keep it tight) and store in your fridge for 4-6 days, stirring the mixture once per day, until the flowers start to turn brown and the syrup takes on a pale yellow hue. Strain syrup through a fine mesh sieve lined with a clean cheesecloth, discarding leftover flowers and lemon slices.
At this point the syrup can be refrigerated in a jar for up to 1 month.

Today’s Stats

Low temp: 68F
High temp: 84F
Sunrise: 6:00am
Sunset: 8:34pm
Moon phase: Waxing crescent
Additional notes: Hot, humid and scattered storms