CSA #22 (10/28/2025)
Farm Notes today, and Food Notes tomorrow!
Why? Because it’s the season of marathons on Henry’s Farm and Henry has not had a moment to think about what crops are best for your CSA tomorrow. So stay tuned, and I’ll send out another email tomorrow to let you know what’s coming.
The marathons so far have included:
1) Pre-frost Harvest Marathons to rescue the cold-sensitive crops
2) Sweet Potato Harvesting Marathon to get them out of the ground before the soil temperature falls
3) Garlic Planting Marathon before the predicted rains in the coming days—and then we go back to pre-frost harvest marathons again ahead of the cold nights predicted for later this week.
Last week we rescued all the peppers, tomatoes and other warm season crops before the two nights around 32 degrees. Those nights killed the cold-sensitive plants, but mostly left the greens and root crops undamaged. In fact, most vegetables get sweeter with the cold weather, so you can look forward to even tastier crops in the coming weeks.
We started this week off yesterday with an entire day of sweet potato harvesting. Sweet potatoes are tropical plants and they too were killed by the frost, and need to get out of the ground before the soil temperature falls below about 55, to prevent chilling injury and rot. As soon as the sweet potatoes are harvested, Henry puts them in his curing room at 90 degrees and 90% humidity. This improves their taste and their ability to store well. After curing, you can enjoy perfect sweet potatoes over the winter months and into spring.
And today was our all-day garlic-planting marathon. Most folks think of fall as harvest season -- and it generally is! -- but today it was planting season as we planted the garlic that we will harvest for you next year.
Today we planted seven varieties of garlic: New York White, German Red, Russian Red, Silver White, French Red, Korean Red Hot, and German Extra Hardy. Henry always saves back the biggest and best heads from the July harvest as seed garlic and hangs them up in the barn to dry.
Today we cut down long strand after strand of garlic, loaded them in the pick-up, and planted hundreds of heads of some varieties and thousands of heads of others. Each head we break apart into its constituent cloves and plant them blunt root end down and pointy end up. Some varieties of garlic have large cloves, so there may be only 5 or 6 per head, while other varieties have twice as many.
By the end of the day, Henry estimates we put some 40,000 cloves into the ground. They will put down roots and then go dormant over the winter. And in the early spring, 40,000 bright green garlic plants will poke their way through the thick straw mulch — destined to be green garlic for your early season CSA shares, garlic scapes a little later, and finally mature heads of garlic .
It’s Time to Renew your Henry’s CSA Membership
Since we just now planted the first crop for 2026, it’s time for you to renew your CSA membership! And because we have a new website, Henry won’t be handing out paper sign-up slips this year. Instead, just click on over to sign up and reserve your spot. You may pre-pay now (Option 1), or you may choose the installment plan (Option 2), or send a check in the mail (Option 3), which Henry will not deposit until the end of January.
Be sure to choose the “Renewing Member” option so you get the 2023 price — because Henry hasn’t raised prices since then! Needless to say, his CSA is by far the most economical one you’ll find no matter which payment option you choose. In fact it is probably cheaper than buying non-organic vegetables of inferior quality at the grocery store!
Henry says you will for sure get carrots tomorrow, and probably a choice of at least 2 varieties of peppers we rescued last week. We’ll give you the full line-up of vegetables tomorow!
