Little City Gardens

Last Monday we put together our last CSA boxes of the summer session. The last box included some exciting things like dry-farmed kabocha squash, bouquets of cosmos, and a gift of herbal first-aid salve, made by Ali Budner, with olive oil, beeswax and medicinal plants from the garden.

Here is an example of the flyers, recipes and notes that we included in our boxes throughout the season. You will notice that when it comes to culinary advice we are quite simple and straightforward. For almost every vegetable we recommend to slice thin and sautee with olive oil and salt. I do find it true that if the vegetables are fresh from good earth they don’t need much more preparation than that!

Now we will spend the fall focusing on our restaurant sales, renegotiating our lease, building compost and soil fertility, and planting/planning for next year’s CSA. If all goes well with the lease, we will begin the 2012 CSA in the beginning of February. If you are interested in applying for a CSA box, write us an email and we will put you on our email list. For those of you who are already addicted to our salad mix and other produce: don’t worry! We will be taking salad and greens orders most Fridays for pick up in the Mission. Look out for the emails if you are on our list.

It feels far off but its already time to start planting kale, collard greens, favas and cabbage for February harvesting. Its about time for garlic planting, seeding onions in the greenhouse, and even though its a little bit late in the season we hope to squeeze in a fall potato planting. We’ve got to sheet mulch the squash mound for next year and open up a new patch in the weedy back of the lot for cover cropping and an experiment with winter wheat.

So there is plenty of work to do in the garden. Its going to feel really good to have some time as we work to reflect on the both the successes and shortcomings of this season’s CSA. We are already starting to integrate some of the lessons that we’ve learned into our work.

We had our first drizzle of the season last week! It barely seeped into the top inch of soil but it was a warm up for the rainy times coming.