Satsuma season

It's been a great year for our satsuma. Hattie just counted about 130 still on the tree and we've already eaten several dozen. North Carolina citrus!
All we do to overwinter our tree/bush is to stack a couple buckets of water on either side of it and cover it with some quilted blankets we bought from thrift stores on the coldest nights, basically just when there's a threat of night time temperatures in the teens or colder.

Which of these can you identify?

String of brown ovals - groundnut Apios Americana, long brown - Yacon, large oval green - chayote, long orange pieces - tumeric, three red circles - spice peppers, yellow ball - bitter lemon, three orange circles - Asian persimmons, dark orange ball - pomegranate, three brown balls - tara, small green ovals - hardy kiwi, large white ball - lion's mane mushroom

What's happening on the farm

 It hardly seems worth mentioning that it's dry.  It's hardly rained since June.  And now that it has cooled off, we're actually enjoying the day after day of sunny weather.  But we don't have to look far to remind ourselves that it's dry.  There's the sprinkler and soaker hose going constantly in the gardens on the remaining crops.  Moving sprinklers and hoses has just become a regular part of our life, something we do every hour or two all day long almost every day, week after week (kind of like changing diapers, except that the baby gets diaper changes even on Sundays.)  We had a scare a week ago with our well but after some trouble shooting we realized the problem wasn't with the well or even the pump but just the switch on the pressure tank.  Then it fixed itself, but even if we have to completely replace the switch that's no big deal.  So we continue to work our well about as hard as we can every day.  But it's hard to get enough water to everything.  In the greens patch, you can see something like crop circles with lush large green leaves inside the circle and scorched small withered leaves where the plants were just out of the sprinkler's reach.  We have a fairly small fall garden, in part because of our early September baby, but in larger part because we knew we'd only be able to water so much ground, so we postponed planting more, waiting for rain that never came, at least not in time for more fall crops.  But we expect the dry weather, if it continues, will actually make easier work of the big root crop harvests that need to happen over the next few weeks: the peanuts and the sweet potatoes.  And the garden season is almost done.  It's been a good year, the pantry is full.  Rain would be nice, but by now it's too late to make much difference for this year's crops.
  The pasture on the other hand, could really, really use some rain.  In October the cool season grasses that are dominant in our pastures should be putting on some of the nicest growth of the whole year.  Fall growth is often abundant, and as an added bonus, it can be stockpiled for winter grazing.  While it won't grow any more in the winter, the grass holds most of its nutritional value and the animals can be gradually let in to eat it, strip by strip, saving the expense and time of feeding hay.  Sadly, unless we get rain very soon, we'll have practically no fall grass at all, and it's already too late for abundance.  We're already offering the cattle hay as they finish up the last stubs of green out in their rotation.  To compensate for what looks like will be a long hay feeding season, we've secured enough hay from a neighbor to hopefully make it through the winter.  We're wondering how precious hay will be in our area this winter.  Fortunately, there was plenty of moisture this spring, but this spring it was hard to find a good stretch of dry weather to cure the hay.  We've been reducing animal numbers lately, butchering some goats and one steer sooner than we might otherwise have and selling a couple goats we might have otherwise kept at least a while longer.
  And with no rain in the forecast, we've begun to wonder about the wheat crop.  It's about time to work up the ground and get the wheat seeded.  We'll keep an eye on the forecast and hope for a wet window to make that happen.
  Even if you're not a farmer, you probably remember how wet it was last year, apparently the wettest year on record, and that actually continued into the early part of this calendar year, but now we're going on four nearly continuous months of very dry conditions.  It seems like our crops have suffered worse from dry spells in previous years, but this has got to be the longest continuous dry spell we've seen in our not-too-many years of farming, at least during the growing season when it really matters.
  A crop we're especially enjoying this year is the peppers, especially some of the less common varieties: the little orange snacking peppers, the long slender red frying peppers, the strangely addictive little green shishito peppers... The peppers are doing well, but we're nearing the end of their season.  Try some of these less common varieties if you aren't already familiar with them!  There are some other very enjoyable and unique sweet peppers besides just bell peppers.

Baby announcement

We wanted to announce the arrival of our newest farm family member, Rachel Brown.

Movable goat shade

Paul built this shade structure today for the goat kids so that we can rotate them wherever we want and have shade for them.  He made the frame out of different sizes of bamboo that fit into each other, and then he split pieces of bamboo to weave into the frame.

Today's CSA share

Field peas, cherry tomatoes, malabar spinach, potatoes, onions, shishito peppers, tomato, okra, sweet peppers

If we had to grow just one tomato variety . . .

. . . it would be San Marzano redorta, and these two photos highlight what really sets this tomato apart.  We were removing the seeds from these tomatoes in order to save the seeds to plant next year.  The bottom photo is one tomato cut into thirds.  That little puddle of seeds on the table in the other photo is the full contents of the seed cavities of that same tomato, and the other three tomatoes were just as meaty.  The contents of the seed cavities of all four of those tomatoes together added up to less than 1/4 cup.  Just one regular slicing tomato the same size would probably yield more seeds than that.  San Marzano redorta tomatoes are just so much meatier than any other tomato we've ever tried, and that's ideal for most of the things we do with tomatoes: whole canned tomatoes, salsa, sauce, ketchup, tomato pies, fresh cucumber and tomato salad... anything where thickness is a virtue.  We think the flavor is great both fresh and cooked into sauce, and because they're so much meatier to start with it seems like they yield a thick sauce quicker with less cooking.