Kohlrabi is currently my favorite vegetable. It's in the cabbage family - in fact, along with broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and kale, it is the same species as cabbage! It's been bred for a big fat round stem, which is the part most-used, though the leaves are edible, too. The outer skin gets peeled off, and the interior is crisp, juicy, and both sweet and a bit peppery. The flavor is similar to mild radishes, salad turnips, or the stem of a broccoli. Definitely a cabbage relative. (Sonora calls it a cabbage-apple.)

I've been hassling Jeremy for years to grow this plant, and this is the first year that he gave in. (He thought he didn't like it.) Turns out that it grows well, and - though many people don't know it - we've been sampling it at the market, and most folks are pretty excited once they find out how yummy it is.

We like it best raw - sliced into salads, alone or mixed with cabbage in a slaw, or just dipped in hummus or ranch dressing. However, we've heard good things about it cooked in fritters, roasted, grilled, and even boiled and mashed like a potato. In the fall we might add it to a dish of roasted veggies. If you have a favorite turnip or rutabaga recipe, it would probably sub pretty well. I'm planning to pickle some in the coming weeks.

If you've got a favorite kohlrabi recipe, let us know!

Remember last week, when we said that we'd nearly sold out of winter things? Well, after good sales at last week's holiday market, it's reached the point that it no longer makes sense for us to go the Farmers' Market. We'll be selling winter squash, onions, and carrots wholesale (or to individuals who want to come by the farm), and we've got a strong finish for the last weeks of the Winter CSA, but not enough variety for a market stand.

Though we'd been hoping to stay at the market until the end of December, it will be nice to have two weekend days again for a while. As of now, we're planning to be back when the market starts again in March, with greens; we'll keep you posted as that gets closer.

If you'd like to purchase squash, onions, or carrots, just give us a holler!

December is here, but we are still farming! We've been seeding greens, carrots, turnips, and radishes, with an eye towards the early spring; the seeds should just sprout in the next weeks, then hold during the dark and cold of deep winter, to start growing again in late February and March.

Our winter sales this year were much higher than we'd expected; we've sold out of nearly all our storage crops except onions and winter squash and what we're saving for CSA. We planted twice as many potatoes this year over last, and next year we'll be planting even more. Same with carrots, beets - even our parsnips are nearly sold out!

It's a great sign of the maturation of the local foods movement - for farmers and consumers both - that winter demand is growing. No longer must localvores follow the plenty of summer with turnips all winter - though winter's pickings are certainly slimmer than August's, there is a huge increase in variety and quality over what was available several years ago. On our own farm, we were excited to be able to provide food for our neighbors for an additional two months this year with our Winter CSA and at the farmers' market, and hope next year to expand our winter growing even more.

This Thanksgiving week, we're grateful for so much: a healthy, happy family, first and foremost; a strong community of friends where we can find support, understanding, and last-minute babysitting; a solid network of fellow farmers, where we can find advice and used equipment; good soil; a new pond; a great preschool; and on this coldest morning of the year, a blazing wood-stove to combat the drafty breezes in our 200-year-old house.

And of course, we are grateful for all of you: CSA members and market customers, neighbors and friends, folks who stop by the farm to help or root for us from afar. Without you - and all the people all over the state and country who are helping to rebuild local food systems, who are willing to invest in small farms like ours, week by week and season by season - we'd never be able to be living this dream of ours.

So, thanks. And we hope your Thanksgiving is as full as ours.

Our farmhouse was built in 1791, and the odds are good that the land we're currently farming has been in some sort of continuous production for at least that long. There's a story that the north wall of the house is extra thick to withstand arrowheads from marauding local tribes (though no explanation as to why they wouldn't have just gone round to the south wall).

Jeremy recently was given a scrapbook of the farmers' market from a former market vendor. We were tickled to see that the first item was a newspaper article from 1979 featuring Alan Monroe, at that time the president of the market association, and at that time growing for the market on the land that we now farm. Alan and his wife Frances grew vegetables and raised beef cows (and their family) here for decades.

By all accounts, they were community leaders - there's a building at the Addison County Field Days named after Fran, who was also a 4-H leader and filled a few roles in Leicester's town offices.

Before the Monroes, the farm had been a dairy (the foundation of the silo still sits near our greenhouse, and the old milkhouse is our current wash station). Before that? Harder to say, though sheep is a good guess. A few stones from an old chimney lie in the tangle of brush where our woods start, near a 50-foot-tall apple tree with shockingly good fruit.

As we make our mark on this land - tilling the fields, digging a pond, building greenhouses - it's good to think about the folks who came before us, who cleared the trees and built the house we live in. We may be first generation farmers, but this land has a lot of experience to share.

The main growing season is almost over. The final CSA pick-up and the last outdoor market are both next week! This has been a really good season for us, on the whole - plenty of challenges, a few disappointments, but mostly good growth all around. We employed more people, worked more land, grew and sell more food than any previous year. We were excited to expand our CSA to include workplace delivery, and that program seems to have been a success.

We also expanded our understanding of this piece of land - where the wet spots and cold spots are, where the deer and woodchucks live, where the soil is more rocky or more sandy. It's been a season of good learning and good work.

The summer may be over, but we're not quitting yet! The Winter CSA starts November 5, the market moves indoors to Mary Hogan School starting on the 2nd, and we've got crops in the ground and in the greenhouse that we intend to keep harvesting through December. (Plus multiple tons of storage vegetables nearly all cleaned, sorted, and stored.)

So, thanks to all our amazing customers - CSA members, farmstand regulars, co-op produce buyers - for making this trip with us! We're looking forward to seeing you this week, and next week - and hopefully, well into the winter. (And while we're talking about it, the Winter CSA is filling up fast - let us know soon if you want in!)

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!

As mentioned in the last post, we have outgrown our market van. Last Saturday, we had it packed as full as we possibly could, including several crates on Caitlin's lap in the passenger seat. We had a great market and sold nearly a dozen crates of vegetables, so we had those nested rather than stacked, taking up a lot less room.

When it came time to load the van back up at the end of the day, however we were puzzled to find that it wouldn't all fit. We pulled crates out and moved them around, but no luck. Tried again. Eventually we got everything in, with Caitlin still stuck with a pile of things in her lap.

We still don't really understand the physics of this problem, but we've heard that it happens to other farmers, too. Next week we may have to take a second vehicle down to ensure that everything makes it home.

Our general business philosophy has been one of slow but steady growth - we have known too many farmers (and other entrepreneurs) who take on too much, too fast and end up over their heads in work and debt. So we've tried to match our growth with our capacity and the market, trying to know where we will sell everything we plant and how we will take care of it.

That said, we also have grown to match our excitement and ambition. Last year we had about an acre and a half in cultivation; this year we're close to five. That was made possible in large part by investment in cultivation equipment and an increase in employees (from one full time to one full time and two part time). We've more than doubled our CSA over last year and expanded our market space from ten feet to twenty.

Now we're coming up against new logistical constraints: last week our market van was packed absolutely to the gills, the cooler is likewise stuffed, and we've got thousands of pounds of winter squash, potatoes, and other fall harvest waiting to come in. The wash station that served us well in the past has become crowded with three or four people working on harvest day. CSA pickup is likewise cramped if more than a couple people show up at once. Watering one acre by hand (or truck) is laborious but feasible; five acres is too much. These are all good problems to have!

Jeremy has spent a fair amount of time in the past few weeks scouring Craigslist and other websites for used coolers, cleaning out and organizing a big barn that had been storage for planting flats and unused equipment, and talking with various agencies and contractors about digging an irrigation pond. He's found a big three-section cooler from a gone-out-of-business restaurant in Brooklyn that we're planning to put in the barn, which we'll plumb and use as a new wash station and CSA pick-up location. The three-section cooler will allow for vegetables to be kept at their ideal temperatures (broccoli, beets, greens, onions, and carrots at 35 degrees, potatoes at 40 degrees, tomatoes, eggplant, and winter squash at 55).

It's exciting to be growing our business, to see the reward of our hard work in a beautiful market stand and the appreciative comments of CSA members. We're proud to be a part of a larger movement that values local, organic, healthy food and vibrant communities. We're proud, too, to be preserving and improving this land, creating decent employment for people in our community, and doing work we love. We do love it, even in August, even in the rain and the bugs, even when the days are long and the fields are weedy. Every year we get better at it, and every year it gets better. I think that's a good measure for sustainable growth.

We've got a lot of lovely produce for the market tomorrow - some gorgeous broccoli, summer squash, carrots, beets, cabbage, eggplant, tomatoes, and more!

Don't forget that starting this weekend, the Middlebury Farmers' Market will be held in the north parking lot of the Marbleworks (by Costello's, Otter Creek Yoga, and the pharmacy). This is to give the Marbleworks folks a chance to finish their landscaping and fix up the lawn. The hours will be the same, and there should still be plenty of parking.

This Saturday is also the MiddSummer Fest, so bring a cooler if you plan to stay all afternoon. See you there!