We wrap up our second CSA season today. It’s been a busy, frustrating, exciting, depressing and ultimately very successful season for us here at Fail Better Farm. (Yes, even with all of that rain in June and July and the Late Blight in August.) As of early October, overall sales for this year are up from last year by an astounding 73%. Unlike the banking and bogus mortgage industries, we actually have to have something to sell in order to make a buck, so that means production was up fairly substantially as well. I’m looking forward to putting together this year’s annual report so that I can crunch some of those numbers and really get my head around some of the things we did this year. (In the “hindsight, 20/20, yadda yadda” sort of way.)

This week marks 18 weeks since we started the CSA harvest, and we have given out $424 worth of fresh, organic veggies to full shares and $212 worth to half shares. This marks a 6% bonus over the $400 that full shares paid for and the $200 that half shares paid for. The smallest shares (by value) were $8 half shares (on 8/18) and $18 full shares (also on 8/18) while the largest were $16 for half shares (on 8/11) and $32 for full shares (on 9/1).

In terms of the goings on around here, I have to say that this is one of the hardest times of year for us to feel productive. The amount of work never changes: there’s always too much of it. But much of that work is much less urgent than what faces us during the summer, and it requires a surprisingly large shift in the way we approach and plan our days in order for us to get anything done. After the summer, we’re accustomed to choosing our work based on how urgent it is. Since most of the candidate tasks needed to be done last week, we’re used to making those choices based on the amount of stress and guilt each of those tasks is causing us. With the change in season, all of the tasks facing us now — though no less important — are so much less urgent that the conditioned response of stress and guilt never really kicks in. So our productivity in the fall and winter really depends upon us completely reconditioning our decision making process. Not really all that interesting, I’m sure, but it’s something that looms over us every October and November.

We finished up garlic planting this week, as any of your following us on Facebook probably already know. We planted just over 5 beds of garlic, at 4 rows per bed, which works out to something like 4000 individual cloves of garlic planted. We used our “new” Cub tractor to mark out the beds this time and discovered that its narrower tires actually give us more room to plant. (The center-to-center measurement of the wheels of the two tractors is the same, but the Cub has narrower tires and so less space is devoted to pathway and more to growing space.) To whit: we planted 6 beds of garlic last year at 3 rows per bed, for a total of 3600 plants. This year, in only 5 beds, we were able to plant 4000 plants, an increase of over 11%. The benefits of that old, kind of janky tractor keep stacking up: even if all we get out of it is a little bit more space to plant in each bed, the tractor will pay for itself many times over in just one season.

A couple of things worth mentioning:

• This week, each of the bags should have had a note in it. The note includes a member survey. Please fill it out and send it back to us. The survey questions will be posted to the blog in a few minutes, so you can copy them for emailing from that if you’d prefer.
• You should each only have one tote bag now. If you find you have extras, please be in touch and we’ll pick them up.
• Sometime in December, we’ll send out (and post on the blog) our annual report and 2010 CSA signup form. Keep an eye out for it and please do consider signing up early.

Thank you all so much for helping to make this year such a success for us. The CSA is an integral part of our farm and we hope it’s been an enjoyable, nourishing part of your lives for the past 5 months.

As always, detailed share information, notes about the veggies, storage tips and recipe tips are all inside the full post.

All shares contain:

• Leeks
• Onions
• Swiss Chard

“Full” shares also contain:

• blue Potatoes
• white Carrots
• Long Pie pumpkin

Bread shares: a loaf each of Multigrain Sourdough and Olive Sourdough

Veggie Notes

blue Potatoes – These are fitting called “All Blue” and are delicious roasted.

Long Pie pumpkin – We gave some of this out a few weeks ago and, as we noted then, they make excellent pumpkin pies. They also keep well, lasting late into winter for us. Of course, the cooked flesh also freezes well.

Storage Notes

Store carrots, chard and leeks in a plastic bag in the fridge. Pumpkins and onions are fine on the counter with no bag. Potatoes do well in a paper bag, in a dark, cool closet or corner of the kitchen. Note too that the potatoes, beets and carrots can keep for months under ideal conditions; the leeks and pumpkin can keep for weeks.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Please let us know if you have any questions, concerns or problems. Also, please send along any recipes you’d like to share.

We hope you enjoy the share!