Weekly Update: Oct 21

Hayrides every Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Bandit Kettle Corn has moved in. Popping every weekend and Fridays afternoon too.

The wicked cool kid’s maze, is right next to the 9 acre maze. Both have 12’ wide pathways, but the kid’s maze takes 10 minutes or less.

Lots of frogs in the mazes, especially in the morning and again at dusk.

This weekend, the temperature will get below freezing. It took me a few hours before the impact of that registered. We still had crops in the field that need to be quickly harvested; peppers and non-sweet corn.

In April we bought 1,200 pepper starts. All sorts of hot peppers; Black Bombas, Thai Hots and four or five other hot pepper varieties. We had a lot of fun planting them as our whole team. We put them in our highest field of sandy loam, which I thought would ensure their success. After a few months, it was clear their growth was stunted. The soil was lacking nutrients (I hadn’t taken a soil sample). We worked really hard to give them love and more water. They responded and we’ve been selling the jalapénos and some of the full plants in the market the last few weeks.

But this week, we raced to get all the rest of the plants out of the ground. We harvested hundreds of plants. Of course, the downside is we are only open for 11 more days. In order to get them all sold before we close, we will need to reduce their cost. Yup, another crop we spent more than we made, but we learned a lot.

We also started to harvest the non-sweet corn yesterday. When we were first deciding what to plant, Jose told us many customers would ask him about non-sweet corn, which he called “Mexican Corn” (for recipes, which is different the sweet corn for corn on the cob). It appeared we were the only one on the island grew it so we thought here’s our chance to fill a need. But as I’ve written about before, we were definitely challenged by many factors planting corn this year. The non-sweet corn has grown well, but we planted it too late. It has just begun to ripen over the last couple of days. At least what we don’t sell in the next 2 weeks, we can feed to our animals. Another learning experience, especially about equipment and timing.

Checking on the field corn, earlier in the week.

This past weekend was our busiest weekend ever. Leading up to it, we were nervous. Would we be able handle the increase in people? Would the increase jeopardize the social distancing and other COVID measures we had in place?

Traffic was backed up all the way to Linnton. When cars reached the bridge, 95% of the cars turned left and went towards The Pumpkin Patch and Bella, on the other side of the island. Probably just one in 20 went towards our farm. Jim kept saying “That is just fine.” We were busy, but not too busy. Customers were happy, no one got hurt and people said they felt safe. We couldn’t ask for more.

Even KOIN 6 came out and took footage of people picking pumpkins (link). And photos of our customers, and employees, in costume were featured in Willamette Week this week. We’re definitely feeling the love and are super appreciative to be able to get the word out that we are here.

Saturday we had our first Costume Day. A series of costume mishaps, including not being able to fit into one costume and not being able to find another, left Jim and me failing miserably — but our team killed it (more photos below).

Brilliantly channeling Indian Jones.

Killing it (and making caramel apples).

Bloody Mary and her bad habits.

And a smashing tribute to our own mini-goat Maybe Bob.

Elmo even showed up in his spider costume!

Next Saturday, we are having our first Unicorn Day! Our favorite unicorns, Tiny Dancer and Elmo, will be on the farm from noon until 4pm. So if you have a unicorn costume or a love of unicorns — Saturday afternoon is for you (October 24th).

The following weekend is our Haunted Hayride and Maze. Because of COVID, we had to get creative. We are only allowing 10 people at a time. Each group will board a hayride, which will bring them to the maze under the full moon. Thanks to an army of volunteers, we’ve been spending our Wednesday nights planning and working on the details. It’s been so fun to have a project to collectively work on. Bad news if you haven’t already bought tickets, it’s completely sold out.

Our first truckload of mint mulch was delivered from St. Paul, Oregon. We will use it around our strawberry plants..

This week, our squash chili has been winning over non-squash lovers. So it’s no surprise that we’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to make it, and how to cook the various winter squashes we have. FYI thre chef’s favorite is Kabocha, aka Japanese Pumpkin.

Kabocha wins for best flavor.

I asked our own farm to plate chef, Christian Ephrem, for tips. My take-away was that most squashes fit into one of two categories: best roasted or grilled - or squash which works really well pureed. I’m overly simplifying — check back later today and I will update this page with a blurb about each squash, and the best way to use it.

Christian and Kat talking pumpkins and squash.

And if you want to try to recreate Christian’s spicy vegetable chili, here are his ingredients:

Butternut squash (you can substitute pumpkin)
Pinto beans
Ancho chili
Arbol chili
Cornmeal
Oregano
Cumin
Cocoa powder
Onions
Garlic
Padron pepper
Tomatoes
Molasses
Rainier beer

Thanks for reading,
xo, Kat

Earlier this week, we tried to fix a few muddy areas in our parking lot, which turned into us scraping out years of bark chips and putting gravel down.

Rainbow over the island. Not pictured: the scores of pelicans flying overhead and the sounds of the sandhill cranes nearby.