Week 41, 2019 | Kristin Kimball | Oct 11, 2019
Harvest season is in full swing now. The corn fields have turned from green to rattly dun, the golden kernels tucked inside their dry wrappers of old silk and husk. Thanks to a huge effort led by Zohar and Jonas, we dug and brought in all the potatoes and half the carrots this week. It was a good haul! The yields on both crops were good – about ten tons of good-sized potatoes, and about six tons of carrots, including the runty or misshapen ones that will be used for juice. We have six more tons of carrots to haul in, and any help on that or our other large harvests is always appreciated. Most of that work is happening Wednesdays through Fridays, so give a call and come over if you would like to help. If you like planting more than harvesting, we have that too, because next year’s garlic is going into some gorgeous and recently subsoiled ground in Monument Field. Sending love and gratitude to Courtney Coleman and to Deb at the Pink Pig for feeding hungry farmers hearty harvest lunches in the field this week. I hear they were delicious.
What else? The on-farm butcher shop is almost ready to open for the season. It took a long time to get our meat saw fixed but it’s ready to go now, and we have a big lineup of pigs and sheep to butcher in the coming weeks, which means pork and lamb are coming your way very soon. We had a temporary slump in egg production, due to the reduction in daylight hours, but it looks like it’s evening out now. We are expecting ten babies in the dairy herd between now and December. That’s a lot of cute little Jersey calves, and should make for a plentiful milk supply this fall and into winter.
All the wild animals are on the move this time of year. Rodents looking for warm winter housing. Deer looking for mates. And skunks! Everywhere. Our award for perseverance goes to our early riser, Brandon. He starts animal chores several hours before dawn, including moving the broiler chickens coops to fresh grass each day. He pulled a coop forward without seeing the skunk that had dug underneath to steal a chicken, and took a direct hit of spray.
My new book comes out Tuesday, which makes this an especially exciting and busy time. Please help spread the word! If you use social media you can tag posts #goodhusbandry. Here are the events happening from now until the end of October: The kickoff reading will be at the Vermont Bookshop in Middlebury on October 16th at 6:30. I’m reading at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck on Tuesday, October 22nd at 6pm. We are hosting a popup dinner in Brooklyn on Thursday, October 24. I’m really looking forward to a reading and discussion with one of my favorite food writers, Tamar Adler, at Books Are Magic, in Brooklyn, on Friday, October 25th, at 7:30. I hope some of our city members can make it to that one. Then I head back north for a reading at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier on October 29th at 7pm, and another at Norwich Bookstore in Norwich VT on October 30th at 7pm. More local events to come in November, including a party at the Grange on November 17th. And that is the news from Essex Farm for this harvest home 41st week of 2019. Find us at 518-963-4613, essexfarm@gmail.com, on Insta at kristinxkimball (me), essexfarmcsa (farm), and farmerkimball (mark), on the web at essexfarmcsa, or on the farm, IRL, any day but Sunday.
-Kristin & Mark Kimball
