Thursdays are potato harvest days. Without a walk-in cooler, the main weekly harvest for CSA and Saturday farmers’ market is mostly confined to Fridays, with potatoes being one of the few crops that can be done a day or two ahead. Towards the end of the season, we dig up all the remaining spuds in one shot, but until then, it’s easier to go weekly. And since I don’t sell potatoes in bulk, curing them for storage is not an issue. It’s a tiny harvest, and the method of choice goes with it. Simply pull up each plant—they’re at 12″ (30cm) spacing—and scrabble around! Fingers work great. I used to use a digging fork, but that’s more work than it’s worth, and potatoes often get skewered. By hand, it takes 20-30 minutes per bushel (about 50lbs/23kg), really fast this year with quite huge potatoes after all the rain, and sometimes stretching to maybe 40 minutes if they’re small and the ground is drier and harder (this’ll happen in a really dry year, where potatoes get little or no irrigation). When the ground is dry, especially in clayey soil like ours that can get really hard, a hand tool like a trowel or tined cultivator can be good to break things up here and there after pulling. I kind of like how primitive the method is, and most people who try it REALLY seem to enjoy it. For the 2-3 bushels we need most weeks, it’s quick and effective! The variety here is Chieftain…
Fieldwork
Burlap expires
After a nice long ride, the burlap (of the burlap carrot germination method) is finally breaking down, shredding as we fold it up off the final carrot beds of the season.
Even in this wet weather, the burlap makes a big difference, probably because it holds the soil heat—the difference is clear at the ends of the beds, where the seed drills extend past the burlap, and germination has barely started.
I haven’t been keeping accurate count, but this batch has done at least eight seedings over the last two years. At about $30 a bed for a double layer of burlap (100’/30m) over a 50′ (15 m) x 4 row bed, that makes it less than $4 per 200′ (60m) of carrots, more than worthwhile. If we’d taken better care of it during this wet weather, mainly by making sure it dried out quickly, it may’ve even lasted for a seeding or two more.
Like floating row cover, burlap is an outside input that I don’t like to rely on, but for now…it works!
Harvesting around the rain
Have I mentioned that it’s been RAINING a lot all summer, like, a few times a day? We’ve taken to planning the Friday harvest to fit the slots between downpours, using…weather radar on the web! It works pretty well, checking the national and local maps, you can see precipitation quite accurately up to 3-4 hours out (it’s a little…high tech, but so is this crazy weather!). To avoid a late morning downpour, we started picking beans—finally, our first snap bean harvest of the year!—first thing in the morning (Maria, Lynn and that’s my bin at the top left of the pic below), so that we wouldn’t be messing with wet bean plants (they really don’t like being touched when wet, they get…diseased). That was pretty satisfying, picking about five bushels before the first shower, which arrived as foreseen. And so it went for the day. You can work between the daily rains, but mud avoidance is not an option—Michelle illustrates!
Pigweed rehabilitated?
You’ve gotta respect pigweed. It’s resourceful, extremely flexible and adaptable, prolific…it just keeps on coming! It’s managed to grow in tiny dirt deposits, through rust holes in the trailer we use to get things around the field. It’s also run wild in one of the potato sections, where we’ve taken to hand-pulling it in one-hour concentrated weeding missions—it comes out by the trailerload…
The strangest development is that, this season, pigweed seems to be turning into a FOOD, a gourmet crop, even. Going down the lambs’ quarters urban trendiness path, I suppose. I started to hear about it from a couple of people, that it was being sold in Toronto (big city) farmers’ markets. There was even a comment here on the blog… Finally, browsing the web site of a farm not so far from here a couple of days ago, I read how they harvest PIGWEED at 12″ (30cm) and sell it as a tasty and nutritious cooking green…and they named it: Amaranthus retroflexus. Wow. Pigweed is the common name for a couple of varieties of amaranth, retroflexus being one of ’em. I’ve learned a fair bit about amaranth over the last few seasons, and there’s lots to like. There are many varieties and four general classes: vegetable (eat the leaves), decorative (the seed heads make colorful filler for cut flower arrangements), grain (more protein than wheat!), and…the WEED. Yes, I know a weed is only what you make of it, and it’s great to discover that we can EAT a plant rather than destroy it…but after all our hard-fought pigweed battles, this is hard to swallow. I CAN’T IMAGINE harvesting pigweed (that is, the weed varieties of amaranth) as a market crop. I mean, it would take some getting used to. And could I find a wholesale buyer, because I have a lot…? This year, I’m growing a couple of varieties of decorative amaranth in the cut flowers beds, last year, I grew one type of vegetable amaranth as a trial salad green, and a while back, I grew a couple of beds of grain amaranth, all from purchased seed, and all the while, weeding tons of pigweed… Weeding amaranth from amaranth. OK, I’m ranting a little… Maybe I’ll stroll out and gaze upon the mountain of pigweed for a while (that’s last year’s pic, it’s bigger now)—eventually, perhaps, I’ll get to a place where I’m simply wondering about all that wasted harvest… (Guest photo of trailerload of pigweed by Maria)
Laid back Friday harvest…
With the poor weather-driven slow growth and setbacks (like, hail), Friday harvests so far this year have been nothing like last year, much easier, less to do, relaxed. There are usually three to five people for all or part of the day, compared to six to eight last season. Comparisons don’t mean much on a practical level—the season you’re in is what you’ve got!—but it’s interesting, and human nature, I guess, to rank and rate and contemplate. Michelle has become this year’s mesclun cutting specialist, cruising in later in the afternoon and slicing up 60-70 lbs (approx. 30 kg) in no time. This year, depending on the veg, we’re doing about 20-40 units for sale, and around 30 for CSA shares for pick-up at the farmers’ market. Harvest on!
Garlic all in
Harvested in three parts over the last week, the garlic is now all in! This crop seems to’ve done well once again (I LOVE growing garlic!). For the first time, there’s a small pile of damaged goods, water-logged from all the rain. But overall, things are looking good. The combination of oat straw (from last fall’s cover crop) and grass mulch worked great (below)—weeds were kept down, and although the paths weren’t as heavily mulched as around the plants, they weren’t bad. We’ve been having trouble starting the riding mower, which means no trailer, so the tractor bucket took its place for transport duties. The garlic is stacked on pallets in the barn. Lynn seems to’ve taken to garlic harvesting and went to town: fork and pull, fork and pull…around 3,000 garlic bulbs hit the local food chain!
Hail damage reassessed
Three days after the nasty hail storm, and the full extent of the crop damage is more evident. It’s quite a bit worse than it first appeared. The plants will bounce back, but we’ve lost a lot of the fruit that were furthest along. Little nicks in maybe 70% of the toms and eggplant and peppers means that the first harvest of these veggies will be…small. Curiously, but not really suprisingly, I’m quite unfazed by this turn. I can really fret about setbacks that I could have avoided, like deciding not to overnight frost protect with row cover, then getting hit with frost, or not seeding a crop when it’s dry, then getting a week of rain and mucky, unworkable ground. But where it’s purely a Mother Nature play, I’m instantly in half-full mode, seeing the good side of things automatically: well, we’ll have SOME first-round tomatoes…and there are lots of other, undamaged crops… So I’m good. But even from my relatively small (and small-scale) experiences with losses due to weather, I can imagine how nerve-racking large-scale monoculture must be, especially in these crazy weather times, when you have dozens or hundreds or thousands of acres tied up in just one thing. That sounds like really bad stress…and mixed crop tiny farming seems by that measure alone, much…better.