Newsletter: Doin' What We Gotta against the Wind

Batten down the hoop house, me hearties!

A happy December to you all! It's hard to believe there's just one month left in this decade (century?) of a year, but here we are. I hope everyone had a safe, happy and vegetable filled Thanksgiving. Ashley, Tyler, Emmalyn, and I enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving meal that only felt a little bit weird. We made our plates in the kitchen while masked, and Ashley and Tyler ate in our dining room, while Emmalyn and I were a dozen or so feet away in the living room. Chris had been quarantining for the past two weeks so she could go visit her folks in Ohio. Couple that with a few familial Zoom calls, and it was a successful, if odd, holiday.

Life at Foxtail is starting to slow down a little bit, at least on the growing front (we keep busy all year round, donchaknow!). Gone are the late night harvests and vegetable washing, mostly because it's just too cold! We finished harvesting the last of our outdoor crops on Monday, enjoy the super sweet spinach in this week's box.

We've found that our harvest and washing window of time has shrunk considerably, especially this past week. With overnight temps in the teens, we can't start harvesting until 10:00 or 11:00, and we need to start wrapping up by 3:00. It's been challenging trying to wash produce, since our wash shed is neither heated nor insulated. It's weird when the 35 degree water in the wash tubs actually feels warm compared to the ambient air temperature, that's for sure!

Because of the temperature, as well as the produce we have on hand, we have begun transitioning into working in the kitchen. While your box this week will be all fresh produce, you'll be seeing value-added products in your final two boxes. We've already chopped and frozen bags of peppers, roasted cherry tomatoes, made applesauce, and we'll be packing kim-chi this week! The last couple boxes might weigh a little less than the ones you're getting now, but there's still a lot of love, labor and inputs going into them.

Emmalyn and I have started to plan for 2021, and we're going to keep our operation much the same as it was this past year. We'll be offering Spring and Fall CSAs again, running from early April to late May and mid October to the end of December, respectively. We'll be back at the Osceola Farmers Market again, and will likely continue at both Midtown and Fulton Farmers Markets in Minneapolis. We'll be looking for ways to expand the products offered on our online store as well as continuing to offer weekly produce deliveries.

One new wrinkle we're introducing is offering our space and resources to our creatively minded community and friends. With a (finally) functioning online store, a up and running commercial kitchen, and plenty of space, we're happy have our first collaboration be with our rockstar employee Ashley! In addition to being an awesome, hardworking farmer in her own right, Ashley is also a wonderful baker! She'll be baking lots of holiday cookies (almond spritz, ornament sugar cookies, Peppermint Patties, and Russian Tea Cakes), and after a most strenuous taste-test by the rest of us, we'll be putting them on the online store for the holidays. More details to come as we get closer, but I wanted to share that with y'all to get your mouths watering.

That's all for this week, until next time, shazbot nanoo nanoo!

-Cody