Wed, Sep 05, 2007 · Filed under Pests & Disease, Summer, Veggies
The cover crop-smother crop-green manure oats is doing rather well! Strolling by the several sections checkerboarded through the field is one of my newfound small fall pleasures. It’s so vigorous and vibrant and…vigorous… In different sections, you can also see pigweed and round-leaf mallow in mad profusion, but low to the ground, towered over by the tall, slender stalks (you can spot some pigweed in the pic, but I gotta admit, I chose a shot that favors the pretty oats! :). Question is, will the oats actually SMOTHER its weed competition. I can hardly imagine the near unstoppable pigweed just giving up. And mallow is no lightweight in the pernicious weed department, either. So, WE SHALL SEE!
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Tue, Sep 04, 2007 · Filed under CSA, Harvest, Summer, Veggies
After the long holiday weekend, I did a quick new harvest for the handful of usually-on-Monday CSA shares. We have three CSA pick-up days, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and harvest for the last two can be mostly combined on Sundays. With kinda cool and cloudy weather today, veggies could be left outside on the table for a few minutes—in full summer heat, they’d quickly start to get toasted. I’ve tried to reduce PLASTIC to a minimum (tiny farming has somehow made me averse to much packaging, especially with plastic). The tomatoes need to be kept together, they’d be crushed if let loose in the final shopping bag. And the greens, well, no other easy solution (I’m looking into reusable cotton salad bags that could be put in the fridge, another future project; I’ve moved to paper bags this year for potatoes). As for the shopping bags, I’m considering reusable tote bags, two per shareholder, that could be swapped empty-for-full each week, but the extra BAG MANAGEMENT I know would be fairly, let’s see…time-consuming. Details…
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beet,
broccoli,
carrots,
CSA share,
garlic,
green onion,
mesclun,
onion,
peppers,
summer squash,
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Mon, Sep 03, 2007 · Filed under Flowers, Harvest, Summer, Veggies
Zinnias, calendula and cosmos, randomly selected, snipped short and stuck in a coffee mug… Who can resist? There’s more time in September days to…contemplate, begin going over what worked out and what didn’t during the year. Like, flowers. I dunno why I’ve put them second to veggies. Maybe it was my annoying experience with gladiolas in Year 1, three or four hundred, all flowering at once, with no time to cut ‘em all and nowhere for them to go (the farmers’ market is full of flowers!). And then, digging up and separating and storing the corms… It seemed like a total distraction from the veggies. No further flower action until the tiny, largely ignored cut flower trial this year, when I finally tried more variety and the obvious was revealed to me: cut flowers are a bona fide part of any self-respecting market garden (at least, of this one!). Harvesting even a ragged fistful of flowers is another simple, profound pleasure I shouldn’t be missing. Here’s to next year…!
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Sun, Sep 02, 2007 · Filed under Summer, Veggies
On this bright and shiny Sunday, we finally released the last of the season’s brassicas from under row cover. The flea beetles have almost vanished and the plants need all the light they can get if they’re gonna make it to harvest. It’s still a bit of a long shot for the broccoli and cauliflower, but the early and prolific Red Russian kale should do fine. For what it’s worth, the long range forecast calls for a warm September—I’m still starting to slip into frost watch mode!
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Sat, Sep 01, 2007 · Filed under Fieldwork, Harvest, Summer, Veggies
It’s not the waste it seems! At a distance, they may look whole, but they’re not. Most of this 100lbs (45kg) of tomatoes are well split or explosively squishy and really not worth reclaiming as gallons of sauce. Given the delicate nature of heirlooms, and the pumping up with moisture from the recent rains, split toms are an unfortunate fact of garden life. For this harvest, we got maybe three good ones for every reject. Not bad. Then, we made every attempt to find the unfortunate ones homes, selling off and even giving away big bags towards the end of the market day. At the house, putting up sauce is already ongoing, and there will be at least a couple of hundred pounds more available for canning around frost. There’s just nothing else I can think of to do with these! And so, to the compost heap…
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