Radishes not riddled by flea beetle bites—it’s a slightly startling and definitely heartwarming sight! The winding down side of the season has its kinda downbeat MINUSES, like frost watch and wholesale row covering/uncovering, and the one special night when most tender crops get toasted by a hard frost and die (even under cover)… It has its PLUSES as well. Round about now, pest pressure declines dramatically, soon to vanish, and that includes PIGWEED, and the tiny but savage flea beetles (cucumber beetles stick around in small, determined numbers right into the subzero nights, but their damaging days are over for the year). Also, the need for irrigation is almost certainly over. These Rebel radishes were planted mid-August and with the recent rain, they’ll do well. Over the last few days, we’ve been laying in more beds of radishes, plus lettuce, spinach, zesty brassicas like arugula for salad greens, even some bok choi, in case we catch an extra measure of sun and warmth during the last of the good growing days. Bonus fall crops? With the pests packing it in, pushing for the latest growing date is the easiest gamble of the year!
Year: 2007
Drought, what drought?
A week after the last couple of inches, it rained again today, a steady, fairly intense downpour that left about 1.5″ (38mm) in around an hour. It came down quick enough to leave huge puddles in a couple of low-lying sections. Pretty cool, they drained in less than 30 minutes, and it reminded me of what too much of a good thing can look like, as I imagined washed out seeds and floated seedlings in new fall beds if the rain just kept on going. Nothing like farm weather for bringing out the fickleness—extreme adaptability?—in people. It only takes a minute to go from cursing the lack of rain to hoping it’ll stop already. How excellent and effortless growing can be when the weather’s going right… Wouldn’t it be great to just take control of the weather (are they already doing it in China?). Yikes!
Share of the week
A specially Thursday-picked Large share, tiny farm flexibility in action for a shareholder who missed the weekend pick-up. A Large is about one and a half the size of the standard Single share. This week: carrot (Touchon), beet (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme), tomato (assorted heirloom), mesclun (9-lettuce), spring onion (Ramrod, Red Baron), summer squash (Sunburst, Golden Dawn III, Ambassador), potato (Gold Rush), pepper (Ace), onion (Stuttgarter), garlic (Music). The shares have been pretty good this year, not over the top (in a superabundant way) as they have been at times in the past, but definitely solid value for the fresh, local, organic dollar!
Early harvest day…
Harvest Fridays begin with empty bins. We have around 50 harvest containers right now, the white and the blue and the green trugs (heavy duty plastic baskets with handles). On any one Friday, some are washed and ready, others have to be rounded up and rinsed. Today’s stragglers drain and dry on the harvest tables. To the left, all new this year, a screen table for spraying and draining bunched veggies. Mostly hidden behind it, the ever reliable washer-and-laundry-basins rinsing and spin-drying section. To the right, a trusty 4’x8′ sheet of 5/8″ plywood that has served as a general sorting and packing table for at least three years now. Leaning against the Milkhouse wall beside the door, the old, tiny screen table (sometimes popped onto sawhorses and used for sorting), and further over, the harvest whiteboard. The extra-wide door leads into a clear space with a table for packing safely out of the weather (increasingly welcome as the days shorten and the temperature drops, a big step up from the all-outdoor fall packing of years past). Up on the walls, two bare bulb light fixtures that soon have to be switched to floodlights, for packing after dark. Add water, bags, rubber bands, scales, digging forks, knives, shears and PEOPLE and the harvest is ready to roll!
Tomatoes to the heap
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…
Latest brassicas released
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!
Cup of flowers
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…!