This Thursday, October 3 is the annual Share the Harvest fundraiser for NOFA-VT's Farm Share program, which helps limited-income Vermonters afford CSA shares from farms like ours all across Vermont.

It's easy to participate in Farm Share - just dine or shop at a participating business on Thursday. There are about 70 restaurants and co-ops across VT participating - local ones include American Flatbread, Fire and Ice, Green Peppers, Otter Creek Bakery, Stone Leaf Teahouse, Middlebury Natural Foods Co-op, and the Waybury Inn in Middlebury, Almost Home Market in Bristol, and Rutland Area Food Co-op and Three Tomatoes Trattoria in Rutland. These businesses have pledged to give a portion of their day's proceeds to Farm Share. You can find the full list at www.nofavt.org/STH.

We're also excited to announce that Addison County has received special funding for Farm Share from the Addison County Department of Health, so NOFA-VT is able to offer 75% funding for shares, rather than the usual 50%. This applies to our Winter Share, so folks who qualify would pay just $62.50 for 8 weeks of vegetables! To see if you qualify, please visit the NOFA-VT website. Farm Share applications are also available at that link.

The Farm Share program generally works by combining contributions from Share the Harvest with funds that farms raise in their communities, so that the CSA member pays 50% of the share cost, NOFA-VT pays 25%, and the farm contributes 25%. In addition to participating in Share the Harvest, we invite you to donate directly to the program on behalf of Gildrien Farm, so that we can help everyone in our community have access to fresh, healthy food. Thanks!

Fall is the heavy harvest season - all the root vegetables, the winter squash, and the onions get pulled and hauled and crated and hauled some more, in the thousands of pounds each. One of our employees told us a story about how she laughed and laughed when some friends suggested she join them for a morning at the gym the day after the crew brought in more than a ton of onions in one day.

We're still getting all the infrastructure in place - the barn in which the new coolers were meant to go turned out to be in worse shape than we thought once it was all cleared out and needed some shoring up (and a lot of power washing), but now is ready for the cooler to be assembled. Jeremy is putting the finishing touches on a root washer to making the cleaning of all those roots much more efficient. All in all it's a busy time!

We've grown dry beans a few times, though never in much quantity, mostly just for our own family. They're a great crop in a number of ways - as a nitrogen-fixing legume they're good for the soil, they don't require a whole lot of work between planting and harvesting, and, once processed, they produce a great and somewhat unusual product that stores well and doesn't take up too much room. The tricky part is that little phrase, "once processed."

The bean plants need to be pulled and the pods dried down thoroughly so that the beans don't rot or sprout. Then the beans themselves need to be separated from their pods (known as threshing), cleaned of dirt and pieces of plant, and checked over for quality. On a household scale, we would just keep a bushel basket of pods handy and shell beans by hand whenever we watched movies or as we were sitting around the kitchen table after dinner. We mostly managed to keep up with our own bean usage that way, but it's not a particularly viable method on a commercial scale. Of course, there are plenty of machines one can buy to thresh and clean beans, but those are also typically not viable on the relatively small commercial scale at which we are operating.

There are a number of small-scale solutions, powered by bikes or made from modified wood chippers. There are also extremely low-tech solutions, like putting the beans in an old pillowcase and whacking it against a hard surface until the beans fall out of their shells, and then pouring it all in front of a fan a few times to blow away debris. That will probably be our solution for a few batches of beans until we figure out which kind of slightly higher-tech solution will work best for us.

Look for dry beans at the market in a few weeks and in CSA pretty soon!

We're excited to announce that we'll be offering an early winter share this year. Get 8 weeks of fresh and storage veggies, from November 5 through December 17. We plan to have fresh greens, including lettuce, spinach, kale, and pea shoots, as well as potatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, onions, garlic, beets, celeriac, parsnips, dry beans, and several kinds of winter squash. The winter share costs $250 and will feed 2-4 people. As always, how many people a share can feed depends on how many vegetables you eat, and how much you want to supplement with more exotic fare like green beans from California. (We won't judge!) Many of the vegetables will keep for weeks in your pantry, so you could even plan to store some through the late winter.

An example of one week's share:
1 bunch carrots
2 pints Brussels sprouts
2 lb potatoes
1 Butternut squash
1 bunch kale
1 cabbage
5 lb onions

You can sign up online, give us a call or drop a line, or let us know in person that you'd like to join. Space is limited, so sign up now!

We'll also be at the Middlebury Farmers' Market through December (it moves indoors to Mary Hogan School starting in November), so there will be plenty of opportunity to get good winter vegetables!

Well, we hate to say it, but it would appear that fall is getting a foot in the door. We started bringing in winter squash this week, and the onions and potatoes are ready to harvest as well. Jeremy drove to Brooklyn this past weekend to pick up the cooler that we will install in the barn to hold all of those fine vegetables. In the next week or so that will get put together, and then the heavy harvest will begin. Also coming out soon: storage beets, carrots, and celeriac. The other fall vegetables - Brussels sprouts, sweet potatoes - are also coming along nicely. Don't worry, though, we should still have several weeks of summer veggies before the frost overtakes us. In fact, we intend to have tomatoes through the end of CSA in October, if not longer.

Now that I think of it, September might be the best month - all the late-summer glory, most of the good fall foods (apples are in at the farmers' market!), and cool evenings to boot. Hopefully there will be enough warm days for a few more trips to the lake before we turn the corner, but even if there aren't, the summer's been a good one. Hope you've enjoyed it, too.