We made it!

Well, we've made it through another farm season, and with one more week to go after tomorrow, you've just about eaten everything up! The cooler has been jam-packed for weeks with all the stockpiled potatoes, sweet potatoes, and squash, but we've just been sending it out little by little each week, and now all of a sudden there's plenty of room in there. And in the field, it seems like just about every week now there's some crop we've reached the end of, some new section of rows that are finally ready to be turned into cover crop.

You've seen the farm through its whole cycle start to finish, from the first leafy sprouts in May, through the heat of summer, then back again to leafy greens, and now moving towards the root crops of November. We've felt abundance, scarcity, and perhaps monotony--but never the same thing month to month, since your cooking moves through the seasons along with the farm. So too on a smaller scale, you've watched each crop tentatively arrive, flourish in its prime, and eventually decline as its time comes to a close. The grocery store may have just about every single thing just about every single week, sourced from somewhere in the world unknown, but here we eat from the same plants the whole time, and so we see the change as each plant moves from its peak of production to its eventual death and decomposition back into soil.

Take this week's peppers for example. These are the last intrepid remnants of plants germinated way back in March, transplanted in May, blasted by hail in July, finally bearing fruit in August for a few short weeks of big, beautiful peak-season red peppers, only to begin to decline soon after, with green peppers mixed in with the slowly-ripening reds. A week or two ago, as the real freeze was coming on, we spent all afternoon picking everything that remained: reds of any sort, half-ripe peppers mostly green with a stripe of red, and the true green peppers to save for later. So last week you saw those last true-reds; this week you have those peppers that were half-red when picked and have now ripened in the cooler to interesting shades; and next week will be the last true green peppers. As for the pepper plants? They're no more, all mown down just like they never were there at all, disced under and seeded to cover crop before Wednesday's rain.

These peppers are a bit on borrowed time, here in the second week of November, but then again, so is most everything else. These plants grew when there was warmth and light and there just isn't so much of that anymore, and so the CSA is coming to a close not because we've decided to stop, but because plants are no longer doing much of anything new! We're working through the last of what was produced during the growing season; soon enough there won't be anything left and it will be time for the season of rest.