Harvest Day! October 13, 2007

There’s blurry photos from the day in the gallery.

The story begins last April, when Mark and I paid $325 for a half vegetable share and a full fruit share of the Colorado State University Community Supported Agriculture (CSU CSA) program. This is a large organic vegetable garden that is part of the CSU horticulture research department. We paid for a share in the spring, and for the past 20 weeks we’ve gotten a huge pile of food to take home and eat every Thursday afternoon. The garden/farm has been a huge producer this year of everything from melons, to corn, to tomatoes, onions, peppers, broccoli, kale, chard, spinach, eggplant and various other herbs and veggies, too numerous to count.

At the beginning of October, we received the first of our killing frosts, and the growing season was officially over. On Harvest Day, we drove out to the farm for the first time (until now, we had been picking up previously harvested food on the college campus). We spent almost two hours ranging the fields, filling a huge bin with our own dug carrots, broccoli, spinach, leeks, kale, pumpkins, squash, peppers and even raspberries. It was so nice to have Mark’s Mom and Dad there with us, who have kept veggie gardens for years, and knew all kinds of useful tips about things as varied as “how to pull carrots out of the ground without leaving the bottom half in” and “how to recognize spinach when it just looks like a weed between rows.”

At the end of the day, we enjoyed fire-roasted chillies, stone soup, and carrying home the three biggest pumpkins in the whole patch.

Sunday night we spent making a huge batch of some of the freshest, best tasting vegetable soup you can find anywhere. And we, in fact, found it in the mud and dirt of our own home town. I think that’s about the coolest food you can make.