News from the Farm – October 8, 2011


We’ve made up a quick survey. Please take a minute and let us know how the CSA season has gone. Thanks.

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/LVBX8BB

A note about the box…the popcorn is not yet ready to pop, but we wanted to start getting you some (more coming next week as well), so you’d have a good supply for the winter. So place the corn cobs on your kitchen counter, in the sun if possible and in a week or two try to pop some of the kernels. If they pop well, then go for the rest, if they don’t, you’ll need to keep waiting. It always seems to take forever for them to get ready. But it’s well worth the wait! The popcorn can be popped on the cob by placing the entire ear of corn in a paper bag and popping it in the microwave. (Take it out when the popping stops) Or by “picking” or peeling the kernels off the cob by hand and popping them in a pot over the stove.

The sweet potatoes should also be given some time to sweeten up. Place them in a warm, dry place for a week or two. Then cook ’em up.

It’s been a good week since our last newsletter. We took the sorghum cane over to DoubleTree Farm in the Grapevine area of Madison Co. and with the help of some really big horses, ground all the juice out of the cane, boiled it down and got some tasty sorghum molasses. There will be some in your last box next week! We spent most of Monday weeding and turned a troubling looking field into nicely weeded rows of growing vegetables. That felt really good to get all those weeds out. As the weather gets colder everything grows much more slowly, including the weeds! So hopefully we’ve done the last of the weeding for this season. We’ve been digging sweet potatoes as well. It hasn’t rained in a couple of weeks, so the ground is fairly hard, making the forking up of tubers quite an effort. We’re a little less than half way through, lots more sweet potatoes still in the ground. Next week we’ll get the garlic and the over-wintering onions in the ground, then we’ll de totally finished with planting for 2011!

Sanaz grinding cane

Ada helping feed the fire during the boil.