Wrapping Up the Season….The Bounty & The Blessings

By Andrea Yoder

Aerial view looking down our valley

It is simply amazing just how much food can be produced off of our 110 acres of land tucked away in a valley.  In comparison to some of the large produce farms out west, 110 acres is just a little drop in a bucket, and yet we can produce tons (literally) of food!  It doesn’t matter how many seasons I go through, I think it will always amaze me to see how the seeds that we store in one small room can, over the course of the season, be turned into tons of produce that at times comes close to exceeding our storage facilities!  This week we wanted to give you a little glimpse of what’s been happening on the farm this fall.

The past seven weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind of activities.  Up until about the last week of October we continued to harvest some herbs, greens and other fresh vegetables.  Thankfully we had a pretty mild fall and some of our late planted gamble crops of cilantro, red radishes, baby bok choi and mustard had enough time to mature so we could harvest them.  While we continued those harvests, we also had to prioritize harvesting our crops to put into storage!  First it was a push to get all the sweet potatoes in, totaling around 30,000 pounds.  Next it was burdock root.  This is a high dollar value crop that is very important to our farm.  We can store it for almost an entire year and there are only a few growers in this country who produce burdock root so we have many customers who depend on us!  It also has very long roots so it’s best to dig it when conditions are dry.  We started harvesting some in mid-September, but really did a push to get it all out by the end of the first week of October.  Thankfully we managed to get it all dug before we had rain and our harvest came in at well over 60 bins or about 25,000-30,000 pounds!  That’s a lot of burdock root and to think it came from only about 8 pounds of seed!

Rows and rows of
Beauty Heart Radishes!

Beauty heart radishes were also a priority and with the warm fall we had, they were growing rapidly pushing them close to the edge of being too big.  But we know they are best after some cold weather so we tried to hold off until we got a few frosty nights.  Thankfully we did get that little bit of cold and we started the harvest.  The other tricky part of harvesting beauty heart radishes is they can be very brittle.  If we machine harvest them we often lose a lot that crack in the process.  So we made the decision to maximize our yields and harvest them all by hand this year.  Overall we harvested well over 20,000 pounds and we still have about 14,000 pounds remaining in the cooler that we’ll continue to wash for orders and CSA boxes we’ll be delivering through the end of the year.  

Brussels Sprouts on the stalk,
going into storage

As our main cooler started to fill up, I knew it was almost time to transition our warm temperature cooler to a cold storage area.  No problem, except at that time we were storing about 30 bins of potatoes in that cooler!  I held off as long as possible, but then Richard declared it time to harvest Brussels sprouts.  In late October we saw the first forecasts for temperatures dipping into the low 20’s.  While Brussels sprouts can withstand multiple frosty nights, dangerously low temperatures in the 20’s can cause damage.  In Richard’s 30 plus years of living in this valley, he also knows that a forecasted temperature of 25 degrees can mean an actual temperature of up to 10 degrees colder in the valley.  Brussels sprouts are too important of a crop to lose, so we started loading up wagon after wagon with bins to bring them in on the stalk.  It takes a lot more storage space, but it’s a much faster harvest and on frosty mornings we can snap them off the stalks.  Just before the first load came in, we emptied the potato storage cooler and moved all the potato bins to a refrigerated trailer that we use once a year in the fall.  I decreased the temperature in our previously warm cooler to 34 degrees and it was ready to store Brussels sprouts.  I lost track of how many bins we harvested overall, but it was around 40 or maybe a little more.  We still have about 20 bins in the cooler and overall we’ll yield about 5,000-6,000 pounds of sprouts!  

As we closed out the month of October, we’d fill up our already full coolers at the beginning of the week as we prepared to pack CSA boxes on Wednesday and ship wholesale orders for the first part of the week.  We had to get creative, we had to remain very organized.  Everything had to have a place and there were some days when there was one way into a cooler and one way out.  On a few occasions, we had 20-30 bins of root vegetables stacked outside at the end of a busy harvest day.  But after the crews unloaded we always managed to find more space to get everything into the appropriate storage environment.  At the end of the day on Wednesday after we had loaded all the trucks, we’d breathe a sigh of relief only to wake up the next morning and do it all again for the end of the week!  While our rutabaga crop was mostly a loss and this year’s carrot crop was a disappointment with very low production, we have still had a very bountiful fall harvest and year overall!  So facing the challenge of exceeding storage capacities is actually a good problem to have!   

The majority of our crops are in now.  We still have a little tat soi in the field along with our little planting of specialty crosnes.  Aside from that, our mission now is to trim, wash, pack and deliver all these vegetables!  This week we’ll be delivering about 52,000 pounds of vegetables total including all of our CSA deliveries as well as orders we’re sending to our wholesale and retail partners.  That’s a lot of vegetables!!   Our crew has been working very hard all season, but especially over the past few weeks to help us get everything harvested as well as working diligently so we can fill our orders, pack CSA boxes and meet all of our deadlines.  We’ve already said goodbye to 11 of our H2A crew members who returned to Mexico at the end of October.  This week we’ll be sending 14 crew members back to their families who are very anxious to welcome them home!  We’ll be taking a little break next week to celebrate Thanksgiving, but we’ll be back at it the next week washing and trimming more vegetables, finishing the last of our field work and some of the other outside missions still remaining on the list.  It’s been a busy, yet very rewarding fall.

2021 HVF Crew Photo (brief moment without masks)

Thus is the nature of our business, the push and the pull, the cycles and the seasons.  As we move into winter we look forward to a little bit of rest and rejuvenation.  We also pause to reflect on the many blessings we’ve received this year, the bountiful harvests we’ve brought in and the thousands of people who have received nourishment from the food that has come off our land.  As we celebrate Thanksgiving next week, it’s an understatement to say we have a lot to be thankful for this year.  

As we wrap up this growing season, we’re already working towards next year.  Our garlic, horseradish and sunchoke crops are planted as is our overwintered spinach.  Fields have been composted and planted to cover crops.  Irrigation equipment is tucked away in storage and we have a list of supplies that need to be ordered to be ready for next season.  Now we’re focusing on cutting and storing firewood, maintenance and repair projects and cleaning up some brush and field perimeters of overgrown trees, etc.  We’re also working on the 2022 CSA season and will be sharing more information about that with the next CSA delivery in December.  

We hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving in whatever way you choose to celebrate.  We are grateful for your support of our farm and hope you have enjoyed the bounty of the 2021 season.  Take care and we’ll see you in December to officially wrap up our 2021 CSA Season!