Fourth Week of Fall Season
Our Online Marketplace opens this morning, October 10th and closes at 5pm Sunday October 12th for a Tuesday October 14th delivery. We plan to attend every week (except next week) until December, weather and member-participation permitting.
What’s Up at Market
What a blast of Fall at the market last week. It was a real turning point into fall crops and colors and brisk temps. Piles of every kind of pepper painted a colorful scene at Abby Lane Farm, also nice looking Persian cucumbers. Wandering Roots shifted into pumpkins and squash with just a few melons left. All the onions and potatoes look great and 4 farms had piles of beautiful broccoli heads. Our weather is cooperating with all these great ingredients for winter cooking. Patrick had the last of the corn so I took it off the list, but he brought piles of a new crop of crisp carrots. Watermelons will likely be done this week, if they come at all, but cantaloupes could persist for awhile.
Fry Farm has started selling dried beans this year. We’ll get more info on them when I return to shopping their farm store post-Thanksgiving. For now, they had black beans, pinto bean and navy beans in 1# bags for $15-16 and I could be wrong about the price so if you are interested, let me know and I’ll research further.
At Jessie’s Cosmic Garden
This has been a full week of food processing here turning concord grapes into jelly and juice. It was an amazing year for my young vines so I’m wondering what next year will bring. I’m ripening pears and seemed to have picked most of the tomatoes in the greenhouse. All the extra cherry tomatoes got made into a beautiful soup and today is reserved for applesauce. I will pick the garden tomorrow before it really chills down but will still have the kales, leeks, and a few other greens into winter.
I’ll be flying down to Santa Fe on Thursday before the crack of dawn and return the following Thursday in time to update the website and send out the newsletter for 10/28. So this order is for two weeks. I suggest stocking up and BTW there are 20% discounts on bulk items in the Co-op bins. I’m going to take advantage, not needing much to eat here before I go, but a good idea to fill the big jars of rice, semolina and steelcut oats in my kitchen.
Link to order form
https://www.heartofthesun.com/csamarketplace.html
Cheers!
Jessie
Important Information (leaving this up for awhile)
I don’t like rules but prefer to suggest some guidelines for the successful running of our CSA. Anyone joining in the last few years has probably not received or been reminded of them. The Old-Timers are quite good about them but we had reminders on the old website that I didn’t include on this one so here goes (and I will leave this up here for a few weeks to catch everyone as well as including it in the link notice email).
Please…
- Watch your statements and leave a payment in your box for pickup when you are not going to cover the cost of what’s being delivered – or make a paypal payment, or stop by with it. Especially during Winter and early Spring Season, our bank balance can get pretty low if we don’t keep accounts topped up. If I use the debit card (often) the transaction is immediate.
- If you are not going to order, tell me well ahead – earlier in the week if its a recent decision and at least two weeks ahead if you are going on a trip or are going to be out for a week or more. I shouldn’t find this out when reminding you to order mid-day Sunday. This is especially desired if you are a regular microgreen customer as I seed them around 12-10 days ahead of harvest. The seed is expensive – making needless chicken treats something to avoid. With a heads up in time, I can plan to grow less.
- Put your boxes out ahead of delivery (will often be later in winter when we drive to Grants Pass). Leave payments taped in them or with a rock on top of them. And please return all my canning jars so I have something to put the next batch of whatever it is in them. Thank You, Very Very Much. I love you all and so do our farmers!
- Microgreens I’ve been thinking about microgreen parameters for some time since it’s heartbreaking to feed them to the chickens who like garbage with equal gusto. Most of my microgreen members have the same order every time they order. I would like to call these subscriptions that I can always fill. When folks order every once in a while I never know its coming and may or may not have seeded enough to cover their orders, though always have some for small orders. I’m trying not to waste pretty expensive seed. So here’s the new rulIf any ‘subscriber’ is going to be gone, give me a heads up 10 days ahead, when you get your Sunday order to check the week before your absence. I will tag all the order emails with a reminder. If you are planning to place a special order or you don’t order very often and want them when you’re planning to order, give me a heads up the same 10 days ahead so I can seed more. You’ll notice I am now using a different sunflower seed (the striped ones from the big sunflowers) so if you’ve drifted away from them in the past, please try again.
- Minimum Orders: ‘Back in the Day’ when we started the CSA, we had structured box prices and an 8-week period in which to spend your box value. Now we are all over the place and it only works well when an X number of people order and a Y number of people have orders over $100. In the old days the minimum order was $35 for the small box if ordering every week. I’m going to make that the minimum order for doorstep delivery. You can place smaller orders to pick up here on order day between 3:30 and 6:00.