Get the news from Essex, New York’s Essex Farm directly from Kristin Kimball below:

It was another week of big harvests here. The Fledging Crow farm crew came over to help get in the celeriac, leeks, daikon, beets, rutabaga and kohlrabi. All that food is safely stored for winter now.

Adam and Bob Perry came by with their combine on Monday to harvest the soybeans. Bob joked that the weed control was so good, he thought we were using GMO beans and glyphosate. Nope. Just horses and humans. Watching them come in, I was nervous that they were still too wet, because when I squeezed them, they seemed squishy, but they tested at 13% moisture, which is just about right. They are just so darn rich in oil that they don’t dry down hard like other beans. They can’t be used until they are roasted, so that’s the next step. We’ll have to hire in a giant propane roaster to do it. We got about 12 or 13 tons.

While they were here we decided to use their combine to shell the black beans. In the past, we’ve done it with flails, on the hard cement floor of the pavilion, but this year Matt, Scott and Adam pitched them into the maw of the combine, Bob revved the engine, and they came out clean. The moisture was a little high on those beans, at 17%, but Nathan and Racey loaned us their grain dryer, and we’re hoping for the best. We have five or six hundred pounds.

There are only a few big field jobs left before we are buttoned up for winter: harvesting mangel beets, parsnips, carrots, and field corn, and planting next year’s garlic…” [Continue reading this Essex Farm Note.]

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