The End of Another CSA Era

Yesterday was the last day of our October CSA session and thus the end of our CSA for the year.  I must say, our past two CSA weeks have been really good.  Last week, we pulled out and harvested sweet potatoes!  I was so excited for this, I should be devoting an entire blog post to it.  While I seriously love all root vegetables, sweet potatoes are one of my favorites, not to mention I was incredibly curious as to how to harvest them.  All you really need to harvest them are:

• a pitchfork; and
• a willingness to get dirty.

That's pretty much it!  Since our sweet potato vines had spread out all over, the first task of digging them up was to find their central stems.  Once we located those and pulled out some of the outermost vine parts, we used the pitchfork to dig around the plants' roots and lift them out of the ground.  And lo and behold, there were sweet potatoes in the ground, just hanging out.  It turns out they grow similarly to potatoes after all, even though they aren't in the same family.  While the plants didn't yield as many sweet potatoes as I thought they would, we still had plenty for our CSAers and some extras for us to enjoy as well.It's almost the end of October- what??  I'm having a hard time believing that we've already reached that point in the season, but with the leaves almost all down from the tulip poplars, I suppose it's time.  That's not to say that our garden is all turned over for the winter!  In fact, it's quite the opposite.As you can see from the picture, we have broccoli!  Isn't it gorgeous?  Our lucky CSAers got some in their shares yesterday, and guess what they also got?  Pumpkins!  Our pumpkins have been hanging out on the vines for quite some time now and are ready just in time for Halloween.  I think pumpkins are one of the happiest vegetables.It looks like we're going to miss getting hit by Storm Sandy (I suppose she's not a hurricane by now), but we are supposed to get lots of rain in the coming days. No complaints here!  I could use a few good rainy days and I don't think our plants would mind either.