It's with a mixture of excitement and sadness that we're announcing that we're going to take a year off of direct marketing for 2016. That means no CSA and no farmers' market sales. We're going to focus this year on wholesale vegetables and medicinal herbs. We'll be selling vegetables to the Middlebury and Rutland Co-ops and to Deep Root, and medicinal herbs to the VT Herb Growers Cooperative.

We're making this change largely in order to have more time to spend with the kids -- when we started farming, working 60-80 hour weeks all season was fine. And while we still love the work, it feels unfair to our family at this point; though we try to involve the kids in farm activities, there's a limit to how much time they can happily spend in the field. It's also nice to be able to have some family time away from farmwork. By focusing on relatively few crops (about a dozen versus 40+) and selling wholesale, we're hoping that we'll be able to spend more of our farming time actually farming -- rather than managing and marketing -- and more -- or really, any -- time NOT farming during the summer. We'll see how it goes!

We do love the community connection that comes from directly feeding our neighbors and friends, and we will miss that. We have deep gratitude to all the CSA members and market regulars who have made this farming thing possible for us so far, and we look forward to sharing with you how our season goes!

If you're looking for a holiday gift, or just want to support a great organization, check out the Rutland Area Farm & Food Link's online auction. It closes tomorrow, December 11, at 10 pm. There are all kinds of great items and services including a gift certificate to Gildrien Farm! We love RAFFL and we hope that you'll help support their work. Click here to see the auction items.

We're nearing the end of the Stick Season CSA, and the end of our 2015 farming season. With the last of the carrots this week, everything is out of the field except for some kale that we're saving for the final weeks of CSA. There's still a fair lot in storage, especially carrots (pictured above) and onions (in their own cooler). We've already wrapped the farmers' markets for the year, though we're still selling to the co-ops in Rutland and Middlebury and plan to do so through the winter. Cold mornings are making for later start times, and soon we'll be having our annual farewell dinner for the farm employees.

It's been a good year for us! We expanded our wholesale sales though Deep River Co-op, which we expect to expand even further next year, and we had a solid year of market and CSA. We had great employees for the season, and no major epidemics of disease hit any of our crops. We were glad to have our irrigation pond during the dry spring. The biggest disappointment was probably the strawberries, but we're hopeful that the plants that made it through the first winter will be  more vigorous this coming spring. Pretty soon we'll start scheming for next year, but for now, the whole family is looking forward to some downtime as winter closes in.

Well, the leaves are mostly down and Stick Season is here - Jeremy is rolling out with the first deliveries now! We're excited to have had good enrollment this year and a lot of good product to give out. We're working on perfecting a way for folks to get to choose what they want in their share online each week, so members watch out for an email about that coming soon!

If you missed the bus and want to sign up, get in touch and we can prorate a membership to start next week.

For folks in Rutland, we're also planning to be at the Rutland Winter Farmer's Market on Wednesdays, 3-6 at the Vermont Farmers Food Center.

Big thanks today to all our summer CSA members – tomorrow is the final pick-up of the main season, and then we have a week off before the start of the Stick Season share. That's our opportunity to take a breath, and take stock of everything in the coolers and the barns, the fields and the greenhouses.

Once again we are somehow out of storage space! We've got the onions in our smallest greenhouse under a pile of blankets and sleeping bags, with a propane heater on to keep them from freezing at night. The three coolers are packed utterly full, and we've got some bins of squash in our mudroom because we don't have anywhere else to put them. The upside is that we are all set to have some great shares and markets for the winter season. We hope to see you there!

Have you noticed that many vegetables -- carrots and brassicas are especially notable -- get sweeter after a frost? In fact, we won't begin harvesting Brussels sprouts until we get a good frost. This happens because some plants are able to use sugar as an antifreeze. Starch in the plant's tissues are converted to sugar in cold weather to prevent ice formation in the cells. As the weather gets colder and plants repeatedly frost, they will continue to get sweeter. (This is also why spring-dug parsnips and carrots can be especially delicious.) Other plants, such as winter squash, can't manage this feat and get damaged by low temperatures, so we bring them all in before frosts hit.

We had a light frost last week and another yesterday, so we've started bringing in the sprouts and the carrots are noticeably tastier than they were a few weeks ago. We're just a month a way from the beginning of the Stick Season share, which beings November 4. It'll feature both frost-sweetened and non-frosty veggies, including arugula, Brussels sprouts, pea shoots, carrots, winter squash, potatoes, onions, garlic, and more! Sign up now!

It's time for Share the Harvest! Each year, NOFA-VT holds this fundraiser on the first Thursday of October to benefit the Vermont Farm Share Program. Farm Share helps to make local & organic food available to everyone in our community, regardless of income, by supporting the cost of CSA shares for limited-income families. We are proud to take part in this program and we encourage you to participate in Share the Harvest. All you have to do is enjoy some great food at a participating local business on October 1, and a portion of the proceeds will benefit Share the Harvest.

Local businesses include:
American Flatbread Middlebury Hearth
Courtyard Marriott 
Fire and Ice
Green Peppers
Middlebury Natural Foods Coop
Otter Creek Bakery
Stone Leaf Teahouse
Rutland Area Food Coop

Learn more and check out the whole list on NOFA-VT's site.

The big harvest is underway, starting with onions. This has been a killer year for onions for us, for reasons we are trying to figure out. Our sweet onions have been just huge -- some over two pounds and about the size of Sonora's head. Those are nearly unsaleably big, though we are selling some to Cattails restaurant, just down the road, for their onion rings. The storage onions are coming in strong as well. We've set up our oldest, smallest greenhouse for onion curing by draping black plastic inside and creating racks with a ginormous fan blowing at one end to keep the air moving. Those silver racks are 8x12 feet and probably hold about a thousand pounds of onions a piece. So far we have about a third of the storage onions harvested. After they dry down, we'll cut the tops off and move them to cold storage for the winter. Last year we were still pulling good onions out of the cooler in April, when we ran out -- looking forward to seeing how long these will last!

It isn't strictly farm-related, but we are so proud of our little pre-K student. (Her superpower, by the way, is "shooting stinky tuna lava.")