BELOVED FARMKETEERS & LOYAL ‘CREEKNIKS:  Welcome to the “Women in Science” issue of Fresh Crop Alerts & Farm Buzz.  Two Nobel prizes awarded this week, physics and chemistry, were shared by women.  This is all too rare.  The physics prize, shared by Canadian Donna Strickland, was awarded to a woman for the first time in 55 years, only the third time in history.  The chemistry prize had its fifth woman winner in American Frances Arnold.  Today’s newsletter recognizes a few great women in science.  Inspired by this classy illustrated book, Women in Science, a great gift for anyone at any age.

JUMBO SALE:  U-pick pumpkins.  Pick any 12 pumpkins for $50 or any 5 for $25.  Any size!  You will find some mega jumbo ultra colossus specimens and also some wee wittle teenie mini pumpies.  (Eww, weird word.)  Find your spirit pumpkin!  No astrologer required.  Just spy the one that has your name on it.  Woman in science:  Rosalind Franklin, born 1920, chemist and cystallographer, first showed the double helix structure of DNA, should have won the Nobel prize

Pick apples.  Jonagold, Macoun, Empire, Fortune, Spartan, Liberty, McIntosh, Cortland, and more.  These are all prime “dessert” varieties that signal high apple season.  All sweet and delicious fresh eaters.  Of the 75 varieties that we grow at The ‘Creek, we are more than HALF WAY through, and apple season will draw to a close precipitously as October trundles forth.  Please enjoy the harvest now.  Woman in science:  Chien-Shiung Wu, born 1912, experimental physicist, disproved a core law of quantum physics, should have won the 1957 Nobel prize along with her now famous male colleagues

JUMBO SALE:  Sudden homebrew cider run!  Last day of the sale is today, Friday, October 5, 2018.  Fill your carboys for only $5/gallon when you buy 10+ gallons.  This would normally be $7/gallon or more depending on volume.  We have to move 120 gallons that we pressed for Apple Harvest Festival last weekend.  Kick off your homebrew projects with great unpasteurized cider.  Leave your carboys with your name and number at the farmstand.  If we can’t fill them while you wait we will call you when ready.  Woman in science:  Hypatia, born around 350 CE in Alexandria, Egypt, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher, killed by religious extremists

NEW & EXCITING:  Donuts served on Monday, October 8.  The long holiday weekend will be all the sweeter – and starchier and fattier and fried-ier – as the Mark II Donut Robot churns out fructotic toroids of pomological splendor from 10 to 6 on Saturday, Sunday, AND Monday.  Woman in science:  Mary Agnes Chase, born 1869, botanist, scientific illustrator, and suffragist, world expert in grasses,  jailed and force-fed while on hunger strike protesting for women’s right to vote

NEW!  U-pick Brussels sprouts.  You can take your half-eaten donut to the Brussels patch to balance out the good you are about to do with the evil you have already done.  Too much good can be nauseating.  Anyway, Farmer Steve wants all Farmketeers to read, repeat aloud, and obey the following instructions:  (1) Find loppers at the Produce Portal which is a crystal-handled rickety door in the deer fence, (2) Find a deleafed stalk, meaning a stalk that had the leaves pre-stripped by a professional farmer, (3) Lop stalk, (4) Return loppers to Produce Portal.  DO NOT pick individual sprouts.  Meaning do not pluck the golf ball-sized cabbages off the stalks.  Take a whole stalk home then pluck the sprouts off right into your wok.  Woman in science:  Marjory Stoneman Douglas, born 1890, conservationist, journalist, suffragist, fought to save the Florida Everglades from ecosystem destruction, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Why do we humans love to put things on our heads?  (Because awesomeeee?)

LAST BLAST:  Sweet corn.  Yesterday Farmer Dusky was all fired up like, “Tell every single ‘Creeknik that we are surfing the last and best wave of corn this weekenddddd!”  Please help our Corn Crushing Farmer Rocker and his nice young family finish a second successful season growing delicious sweet summer corn.  We thank you with butter on top.  Woman in science:  Gerty Cori, born 1896, biochemist, helped solve the mystery of how cells use sugar for energy, helped understand diabetes, first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

NEW:  Winter squashes.  Delicata, butternut, acorn, sweet dumpling, blue hubbard, and pie pumpkins.  They all have their place in this world but delicata is the only one that can keep us farmers up past our bedtime.  Last night, way too late and way too tired, we sliced a delicata in half on the strength of the allure of broiled delicata crescent snacks, but never got around to scooping out the seeds and slicing and slathering with oil, salt, and pepper, and actually broiling.  Just ran out of steam and melted onto the couch.  But delicata is like that.  It can make you start things you don’t have the steam to finish.  Women in science:  Marie Curie, first woman to win a Nobel prize (physics, 1903) and the only woman to win twice, and Irene Joliot-Curie, her daughter, who also won (chemistry, 1935), each for seminal work on radioactivity

You woke me up to put THAT on my head?

NEW & EXCITING:  Fresh ginger and turmeric and everything you need for “fire cider.”  We are loving these autumnal additions to the farm stand lineup.  Our friends at Tree Gate Farm are dropping off exhilarating rhizomes, ginger and turmeric, from their small farm round the block.  As luck would have it, the ‘Creek is host to an impassioned cohort of herbalists who work at the farmstand!  Text message to the Crop Alert department said, “Turmeric, ginger, garlic, onion, and hot peppers… You infuse them into apple cider vinegar for an immune boost throughout the cold seasons.”  People call it fire cider, and you can get the ingredients at the stand.  Woman in science:  Katia Krafft, born 1942, geologist and volcanologist, “Krafft Medal” now awarded to exceptional volcano scientists, killed with her husband and 41 other scientists and journalists by a pyroclastic flow in Japan

Ginger and turmeric in the fall?  Sharon from Tree Gate Farm tells their story:  “Crazy, right?  The seed comes from Hawaii (arrives in March), and using a greenhouse and a lot of compost, we spend 8 months working to convince it that the Finger Lakes region is almost as wonderful a place to grow as the tropics.  Unlike what you find at the grocery store, our uncured baby turmeric is snappy and sweet, roughly the texture of an apple or a slice of water chestnut.  And no peeling required!  Just be sure to use or freeze within a week; it’s perishable.”  Thank you, Tree Gate, for making these culinary treasures available to Farmketeers.  Woman in science:  Sally Ride, born 1951, astronaut, physicist, engineer, first American woman in space, broke that glass ceiling in the sky

FREE EVENT TOMORROW – Saturday, October 6.  Orchard tour and tasting at Eve’s Cidery.  Our friends and family at Eve’s Cidery grow weird cider apples on hundreds of trees from our nursery and they make brilliant artisan ciders.  See their national press coverage.  Eve’s Cidery is renowned for educating and inspiring so many producers in the current American cider boom.  We’re proud to know these progressive and creative farmers from the little hamlet of Van Etten.  Register here free for their orchard tour and tasting.  It is free but you need to RSVP so they know what’s up.  It would be cool if a BUNCH of Farmketeers took the free tour and bought bottles of Finger Lakes champagne-style cider from one of the pioneers.  Woman in science:  Autumn Stoschek of Eve’s Cidery, hard cider science pioneer :-)

Love to y’all.  Hope to see you at The ‘Creek.