Brought in our compact collection of pumpkins today, ahead of likely frost this weekend. Never been big on pumpkins as far as quantity, but they are fun to have around. This year, some standards like Connecticut Field, a bunch of Small Sugar pie pumpkins—always handy—and one novelty type, Jamboree, in a fetching shade of greenish-grey-blue. Some went into the seedling room, the rest, under cover in the tiny greenhouse. One more fall thing done…and it’s still SUMMER!
Harvest
Beautiful bok choi
Friday harvest. Each week, there’s usually one crop that kinda catches my eye: a perfect first cut of baby lettuce, lush green onions with straight white stems, or today’s chunky, crunchy bok choi (aka bok choy, pak choi). The variety here is Joi Choi, it’s worked out well over several seasons, slow to bolt, willing to roll with varying amounts of rain. This batch caught good conditions, with lots of sun and weekly rain. The stems are thick and crisp, and the leaves startlingly flea beetle unbitten, thanks to row cover and to the FBs dying down for the year. With minimal help…things worked out for these guys! Nice.
Some winter squash
Brought in the first of the winter squash, an early variety of butternut (called…Early Butternut), Uchiki Kuri (orange, Japanese Hubbard-type), acorn and pasta. We didn’t grow a lot, a few 50′ beds, mainly for the weekly harvest shares and personal use. Curing here is usually not involved at all, just keeping them out of the fall cold, but this year, we may try high temperature/high humidity curing for some, not so much for improved storage, but for taste. More as we decide.
First potatoes
Dug up 40 lbs of Yukon Gold potatoes, to see how they were doing, and for this week’s harvest shares. Not a bad haul for 50′, planted late, at the end of June, but they still have some growing to do. We’re harvesting spuds in our usual labor-intensive way, with a digging fork, then scrabbling around by hand. Slow but fun. One drawback: with newer potatoes, scraping, prying fingers can tear up those delicate skins. Here, we did pretty well.
Weekly Harvest Share #2
A pretty satisfying second installment of our “experimental” Weekly Harvest Share: “Like CSA, but one week at a time…”! Satisfying because, for the first time this season, harvest day felt kinda normal, with around 20 items harvested, enough variety to have to pick what went into the shares. And the winners, the veggies that made it through thick and thin: kale (Red Russian—no worries about running out of RR…), beets (Kestrel), carrots (Nelson), zucchini (Golden Dawn III, always there in numbers), cukes (Fanfare, Lemon), baby leaf lettuce (house blend, and a nice first cut!), beans (Jade, Indy Gold, first picking of this planting), assorted cherry tomatoes, green onion (Ramrod), sweet pepper (Cubanelle, picked young and green), onion (yellow cooking, from sets, kinda…compact), peppermint & spearmint (bagged, for tea!), and eggplant (old reliable Dusky). So, better late than never!
Play in mud!
A mid-winter flashback to one of my favorite farm photos—it’s just so…hands-on. On the tiny farm, many of the things we otherwise consider inconvenient, like rain and MUD, are actually just fine. Sunny days are NICER, but there’s plenty of room for wet as well. Originally posted on Friday, Aug. 8, 2008, when we were harvesting-around-the-rain. (That’s Michelle.)
Last of the chokes
Digging up the very last of the Jerusalem artichoke, this is pretty much the final harvest of the year, besides a little kale and maybe a last few tiny cauliflower and cabbage. The few remaining feet of the original 50′ (15m) double row yielded about half a bushel. Not bad. Plenty for spring planting, and some to experiment with in the winter kitchen (I still haven’t fully figured out the eating part of chokes, I’ve steamed and roasted, the texture is nice, the taste mild, but the JA’s true culinary delights have yet to be revealed to me).
Anyhow, despite many freezing nights, the ground is still perfectly soft, and the harvest is all just pulling chokes, with the digging fork around only to turn the nearby soil in search of tubers that strayed from the conveniently compact root ball. Quick and easy, and the season in this field is suddenly…done!