Where the oats arrived with a dramatic, iridescent splash of green, the fall rye made a much more sedate entrance, so much so that I didn’t notice it until today. It probably emerged a couple of days ago. It’s looking great! I dunno why I’m so extremely pleased by these green manure cover crops…but I am! The rye comes with a lot of promise. It probably won’t winterkill, instead, start up again in spring, making it good for sections that won’t be planted out till May. It thrives in cool weather, also making it great for fall and spring service. And it may have an allelopathic effect on PIGWEED, meaning that, on a plant-produced chemical level, future pigweed may suffer… That’s nice. On the caution side, if it gets too well-established, it could be a little tough to eradicate. No worries. I won’t seed it on sections that’ll be used for the earliest spring planting (there won’t be time to till it in), but otherwise, I’ll spread this around everywhere I can for the next month or so and see what happens!
Month: September 2007
Big sky
Autumn, what autumn? A finer summer’s day it would be hard to imagine… A warm, gentle sun in an absolutely cloudless sky. A silky soft breeze, without a trace of stultifying midday heat. Here’s the widest view possible with this camera, from the highest vantage point around: the market garden where I spend so much of my time! It all still seems a little odd to me, but I wouldn’t want to give it up!!
Unruly heirlooms
Left to their own devices, these heirloom Touchon carrots grew all over the place, an assortment of shapes and sizes. They’re in a bed where the mid-summer germination was spotty, and uneven spacing no doubt had a lot to do with it. Compared to our other mainstay carrot, the generally uniform Nelson hybrid, Touchons definitely show a lot more individual carrot character… As a trained-from-birth first-world consumer, I guess I’ve tended to automatically favor uniformity in many little things, like…carrots. On the tiny farm, that training’s being undone!
Pumpkins come in
A leisurely late afternoon harvest yielded one trailer and one tiny tractor bucket piled with pumpkins. I didn’t count—there’s more to come—but I’d guess around 70. Pumpkins don’t have a big market value here just yet, but they’re fun to have around and they generally come through with little care. These guys received absolutely no irrigation and suffered somewhat for it, but they managed! The varieties: Connecticut Field and Neon for the bigger orange ones, Snackjack and Small Sugar for compact (3-5 lb), CSA share-ready selections, and Jamboree for that bit of difference (they’re the greenish-grayish ones). We’ll clean ’em up and lay them out on the nicely roofed farm stand to give the stand a bit of a purpose for fall!
Return to Jerusalem artichoke
Various garden experiments are going on here and there. The new oats and fall rye green manure cover crops are doing well. There are five or six tarragon starters, three divisions from a potted lovage, coriander seed dried on the standing plants… Several varieties of hot peppers have to be given a final performance check. And so on. One I keep noticing and promptly forgetting again is the Jerusalem artichoke, planted so long ago. They’re definitely tough. The fuzzy-textured leaves seem rather delicate and wilt alarmingly without water, but they’ve survived with little weeding and maybe one watering all season, and they’re looking happy now.
Another unusual characteristic, compared to almost all of the other veggies and herbs, is how un-uniform they are, at least in this first year, with plants of all heights, ranging from around a foot to over three feet (30-90+ cm). There’s not much variation in leaf size, simply in…height. Well, JA’s supposed to be prolific—we’ll soon see when I check in on the gnarly tubers down below…!
Rainy day harvest fashion
Jo sports a borrowed rain jacket with snap-on drawstring hood, in striking work yellow—perfect protection for a rainy harvest day. Today was probably the wettest harvest Friday of the year, and it wasn’t bad. A couple of heavy downpours kept us indoors for quite a while (snapping farm fashion shots out of the Milkhouse door…), otherwise, a light drizzle for part of the afternoon hardly slowed us down. For the occasional wet work, Conall favors a full rainsuit, jacket and pants, while I so far make do with a hooded rain jacket—I’ll pop inside and wait out the heavier stuff. Lynn arrived after the major downpours. Today’s four-person crew made good time despite the weather. For the record: mesclun, spicy salad greens (arugula, mizuna, tatsoi, red mustard), collards, kale, spinach, radish, carrots, beets, green onion, summer squash, bok choi, tomato and potato (harvested yesterday), and garlic and onions from storage!!
Off to market…
Early Saturday from May through October, just before 7 a.m., I’m heading down the road with Bob, making the quick 12 mile (19 km) hop to the farmers’ market in the center of town. Up at 5:30 after only three or four hours sleep, I’m generally a little groggy, and the drive is a pleasantly dreamy trip through peaceful farm country. Once in a while, though, a sharper awareness breaks through. We pass a farm that’d been turned into a seniors retirement home as a way to survive. We travel through a rapidly increasing number of adjoining farms, thousands of acres of them, bought out in the last couple of years by the Mennonite community—the continued farming is great, the seemingly monolithic takeover somewhat unsettling because it’s to me an unknown. The last farm on the way in to town is owned by the municipality and waiting for demolition. You can see the silos and buildings outlined in the fog ahead, right beside the lights of the new, low profile, high tech superprison that’s probably a bigger full-time employer and overall economic force than all of the farms on the drive put together. In the wrong frame of mind, I can really feel the decline-of-farming statistics I read about, and everything seems totally out of balance and more than a little surreal… Luckily, the farmers’ market is always fun!