Winter got off to a good start yesterday. In the shares are leeks, radicchio, winter radish, kohlrabi, escarole, yellow carrots, frisée and mustard greens. Two heads of radicchio and both escarole and frisée was twice as much chicory as planned for, but the warm weather has sped those crops up and with the predicted freeze next weekend I figured these would keep in your refrigerators better than they will in the field. Most of the rest of the items in the share are also in there because I was worried they wouldn’t make it through a hard freeze, and other crops we have in the fields now should be ok even if it gets quite cold.
A highlight for me yesterday were the forced chicories we had on the farm stand (tardivo, and isontina which you can see a picture of @slowhandfarm on Instagram). We dug more of those yesterday to force for the next distribution so I’m hopeful we’ll have more soon. The basic forcing process is that we take the dug roots and tops, cram them together tightly in one of our black crates with the roots down, tops up. Then I put that in my basement in a shallow tub of water, and cover it to keep the light out. The energy from the roots forces new growth which is very tender due to the lack of light. The most commonly recognizable version of this here in the US is Belgian endive, which we didn’t have yesterday but I hope to have some of later in the season.
Yesterday we also managed to take the old plastic entirely off of the hoop house. We do this every winter to let the winter rains in and so that we don’t have to worry about the potential of heavy snow collapsing the tunnel (it doesn’t happen often, but it’s always a worry in the winter). We’ll leave the cover off for a month or two, let the ground get a good soaking, and then we’ll put plastic back on to protect early spring plantings.
Cully Neighborhood Farm 