I confess, todays rain did dampen our spirits a bit. But only a bit, and only because of extenuating circumstances, including trucks getting stuck in the mud and later getting stuck in traffic. We are making the seasonal shift in strategy that includes having the tractor on hand at all times to pull trucks out of the muddy fields as needed, and getting the field work done as quickly as possible so as to wind up inside the barn cleaning garlic for more of the wet times. We just appreciate a nice shower and a fire at the end of the day a little more now.
Today began our winter squash harvest, hurrah! We selected a few hundred delicata types to start with. They will all benefit from a five day wait on your table or counter top as we have not had a frost yet to sweeten them up, you’ll have to fake it by curing them a bit. We have three separate delicata types, all with stripes, all silky smooth and sweet, so delicious. We recommend baking them in halves and enjoying just like that. The skins of these small fruits can be eaten as well as the flesh, just scoop out the seedy middles before or after baking or steaming. More squash recipes will come in the next few weeks with more squash.
Our mutual CSA season of delights will continue certainly through the end of October, perhaps longer. We will be sure to let you know when it winds up, until then, keep on picking up your shares of the autumn bounty. We have all the finest Northern European peasant foods to share with you, as one of our Market customers remarked this weekend.

For those of you who are under the (mistaken) impression that you don’t care for beets, here is a bit of prose by Tom Robbins to inspire you. Those of you who adore beets and Tom Robbins will recognize this as the opening lines of Jitterbug Perfume.
“The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon tot he Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.
In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurtzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurtzel we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurtzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins B-e-e-t-----.
Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. ( Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren’t sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)
An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.”
That is a risk we have to take.

I probably should have left out that part about the hemorrhoid and the rest but I didn’t want to mess up a quote. Anyway, I hope you are sufficiently inspired to eat your beets now. I know I am, and I want to read Jitterbug Perfume again for the umpteenth time.