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!
Fieldwork
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.
Massive new potatoes
Our first potatoes of the year are HUGE, some of the biggest potatoes I’ve grown by far. I guess they really liked the rain. First dug: Yukon Gold and Chieftain. As usual, the harvest method is as manual as it gets: crawling along the rows, pulling up the plants, and scrabbling around by hand. More fun in the mud…
Digging garlic
Considering that our clayey soil has hardly had a chance to dry out with all the rain, this year’s garlic is looking good. With Lynn digging away, the first third of the garlic patch is up and stacked to dry in the barn. I’d been worried about rotting (and Con at the market had already reported losing a lot of his to rot), and checking every couple of days for the last two weeks. Maybe 20% of the bulbs are soaked and come up pinkish-brown—dunno how they’ll look when they dry out, but the cloves are fine, so it’s lots of home use and seed garlic at the worst…
Beans and big weeds
Hand pulling big weeds is a regular garden feature this summer of rainy, weed-favoring weather. In the before and after, the second and third plantings of snap beans (Jade and Indy Gold) are disappearing under soaring lamb’s quarters and pigweed: a couple of hours and a couple of pairs of hands later and they’re looking good.
More carrots
Wouldn’t DREAM of starting carrots without the burlap method now. Maria and Lynn remove burlap from the third planting of the season, using the fold and fold again approach rather than rolling it up…
Cut flowers arrive
Zinnias bloom! At least, a few varieties are starting, along with many of the other cut flowers in this year’s trial bed. Much of last year’s first trial bed wound up worse for the wear after drought and infrequent weeding. This year, I tripled the amount of the same flower selection, about a dozen direct-seeded annuals, divided into two sections.
With all of the rain and and more attention, they’re doing a lot better…
