Great weather into the first week of October, with no hard frost so far. The veggie harvest list: beets, carrots, peppers, garlic, onion, green onion, zucchini, spinach, kale, lettuce, cabbage, butternut squash, radicchio, broccoli, eggplant. Nice!
Veggies
Summer ends!
For the last day of summer, a rainbow! The field is looking a bit bedraggled, with some things naturally dying out, some touched by near-freezing overnights, with tender crops row-covered against the possibility of a hard frost. Besides the rainbow, it’s not the postcard look of mid-summer, but what matters most, everything is still producing well!
Mid-September harvest
The weather’s been fine, no big frost worries, and the harvest is nice. For the sake of a list, in no particular order, we have: spinach, onion, garlic, carrots, bok choi, broccoli, lettuce, cabbage, kale, hot and sweet peppers, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, green beans, beets, and…eggplant! I think I got ’em all. The set-up on a strip of canvas is for a newsletter photo–the lighting is an overcast sun, the studio is the field!
Early summer harvest
Bigger harvest, still mostly green. Beets, snap peas, spinach, garlic scapes, zucchini, kale, green onions, arugula, bok choi.
Veggies appear
Veggies are starting to size up! Pretty good germination for this spinach. And the weeds.
Seed in the field
Pretty drab view of an empty patch on a partly cloudy day, but there’s new seed under there! Spinach, radish, peas, beets, green onion, lettuce, went in a few days back, perfectly timed for the last couple of days of slow, steady rain to get them started. You can see the faint lines of the seeder. (In front, mulched with straw, this year’s garlic is coming along well.) Rain also exposes the many stones and pebbles in this ground. Thousands have been cleared away, and they keep pushing up. It may look like a lot, but they’re not a problem. Live and…let be rocks!
Seeds under plastic
Plastic that looks like plastic adds its own surreal touch to any scene. I use sheets of food wrap to cover plugsheets trays until the seedlings push up above the surface. The plastic holds in heat and keeps the seedling mix moist, both of which the seeds definitely like. As soon as the seedlings emerge, off comes the plastic. Time to let the air flow. I reuse new sheets of wrap for a whole season. With use, they lose their clinginess and are that much easier to handle. The little things add up!