Rising River Farm
13208 201st Ave SW
Rochester, WA 98579 360-273-5368
contact@risingriverfarm.com
www.risingriverfarm.com

September 12 ***** Box 13

Hello,
We have been thoroughly enjoying this past week of crisp, sunny days. We know the sun could leave us at any time and not return until June so we try to relish it when it’s here. It is looking a little cloudy out there now, hmmm….
There is suddenly a lot more work to do. For a while we were in a steady groove of weekly harvest, a little weeding, market, and CSA delivery. Suddenly several big fall projects are begging to be done at once. As I mentioned last week, the onions got pulled and are lying out to dry. The crew has been pecking away at cleaning, bagging, and getting them in under cover. They are ¾ of the way through. The potato vines have all been cut for a few weeks now (which makes the skins to set and thicken for storage.) Jim fired up the old funky potato digger last week and got half of them dug up, bagged, and stored away. We’d like to finish that this week. The potato digger is a creaky old machine that gets pulled behind the tractor. Three people stand on the platform and as the machine rolls along it digs the spuds and carries them over a series of conveyor belts that pass before the workers who then grab and bag them. We do almost all the harvest by hand, but when it comes to the mass potato harvest we need this crazy thing. Our soil turns to cement when it dries out too much and it needs to be dry to dig potatoes for storage. We figure we save about 5 years on everyone’s back by using this. Our seed garlic has arrived and we’ll be planting that within the next week or two. That project takes many hours of many hands poke, poke, poking each clove in the ground one at a time… The final big thing-for now anyway- is cover-cropping. We need to do a ton of tilling first to turn under all the expired patches of this and that and then scatter the rye and clover.

IN YOUR BOX:
-Everything should be recognizable by now. Still lots of tomatoes. The long greenish-reddish peppers are called “Atris” and are sweet. Those will be rotating around the sites. We don’t grow hot peppers for CSA. We’d hate to accidentally shock someone!
-Yesterday we had a record-breaking broccoli harvest, so there is plenty for all.
-YELLOW-FLESHED WATERMELON- The flesh is yellow and so very sweet. It has seeds, but not too many. We grow these every year-dicey though it is to grow melons here. They are just coming on now and we only got enough for one or two pick-up sites this week. Assuming we don’t get a hard frost or excessive rains, there will eventually be enough for all. It may take another week or two to get to all of you.
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Enjoy the tail end of summer goodies, the weather is a’changing. Soon we’ll be shifting into fall comfort foods, but not just yet.