Category: Harvest - Page 15

Ah, SPRING!

1 Jun 20265 Apr 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Man, what a difference a day and a bunch of degrees can make! The temperature didn’t exactly shoot up, but it went from hovering around daytime zero, to around 10°C (50°F). This was one weather trend, predicted on the 15-day-forecast weather site, that I figured wouldn’t suddenly go south (it’s gotta warm up sometime), so I’ve been waiting for it, to the day, for a couple of days now. It’ll get steadily warmer for a week or so, than maybe drop a bit, but even if we get another BLIZZARD, the ground will have warmed up enough that new snow won’t be able to stick around for long. So, I do believe, SPRING IS HERE!!!

I woke up to sunshine, and without even checking the temperature or confirming the forecast, set up a table outside the Milkhouse and out went the leek, onions and parsley for a little rapid hardening off. Getting them out to the greenhouse in a couple of days will free up a lot of rack space!

Wandering around the field a bit, checking the melt-off’s progress, I poked around the edge of the Jerusalem artichoke bed. The ground was still fairly frozen, and had melted to clayey muck only in spots. Poking around in a soft spot at the base of one of the plants, I came up with a handful! First harvest! The tubers look beautiful, the ones in the front of the pic about marble size, the biggest in the back, like a golf ball. As seed stock, there’s going to be a ton from the 45 pieces planted last year. I didn’t end up harvesting any in the fall; now, I’ll get to for the first time eat ’em!

Seasonal salad

7 May 201318 Mar 2008 by Mike (tfb)

The first harvested dish of the year here usually comes from early lettuce, but not usually from lettuce still in plug sheets. With my ambitious early salad greens timing, and the way colder than hoped for weather, transplanting to the greenhouse was delayed by a couple of weeks, and the lettuce seedlings stayed in trays and went crazy. Today, I started thinning them heavily for the move, and ended up with a healthy portion of baby leaf salad! This is a mix of Simpson Elite, Granada, and Two Stars. The colors are still indoors pale, the taste and texture delicate. With a simple olive oil and lemon juice, salt and pepper dressing…delicious! And still a couple more bowls to go…

Tea and fungi

9 Nov 201326 Feb 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Chamomile tea prevents damping off—I’m a believer! It’s one of those natural but-do-they-really-work remedies, used where more product-minded folks would fork over a few bucks for a bottle of No-Damp fungicide… I brew up a batch of tea, dilute it by eye to a pale gold, and apply every couple of days with a fine-misting spray bottle. I’m pretty casual about the recipe, and keep spraying until the seedlings are established (that’s my method, there are more precise instructions around as well, search online).

Damping off is the name for a bunch of different fungal infections that can hit seedlings in trays with similar effect. In my encounters, the damage appears right below the soil line, strangling the stem just out of sight. Dig up a stricken seedling and there’s a small section of the stem, all pale and shriveling to nothing, while above and below, all looks well (the symptom’s called “wire stem”). It’s pretty shocking to see in action. One minute, your seedlings are looking all perky, and then you touch one…and it topples over! Whooaa!

Up to a couple of years back, I’d lose a few seedlings, usually PEPPERS for some reason, never anything major, parts of a tray or two, but enough to be scary. I seed-start in soilless mix (so it should be disease free), trays and tools are given a good disinfection at the beginning of the season, there’s always plenty of air circulation, and I make sure the soil surface doesn’t stay wet—all the things these soil-borne fungi don’t like. Still, damping off was sneaking in, until chamomile tea spray came along… Coincidence?

More carrots…

2 Aug 201012 Jan 2008 by Mike (tfb)

A good stretch in the field today. Harvested a bushel and a half of carrots (huge Danvers Half Long, enough to last through the winter) and a bushel of beets, a mix of red, golden and the Chioggia striped. Mulched another garlic bed, leaving just one uncovered. Did some clean-up with the compact tractor, moving empty barrels, turning crop remains into one end of the compost windrow. Took a trip down to the pond: it’s unfrozen, with only a layer of ice on top…

The pond is as full as it gets. Normal level is several feet lower, after the winter runoff evaporates, usually sometime in June. The barrel is a float that keeps the end of the uptake hose that leads to the pump suspended above the bottom.

A little fieldwork

10 Nov 202310 Jan 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Spent about four hours out in the field. The feeling of calm satisfaction as you head in after doing some work in the garden never fails! I dug up about half a bushel of carrots to see how they’ve done. These are, I think, Nelson and Danvers Half Long (the BIG ones)—the label stakes were out, so I couldn’t immediately check the varieties, it’s not necessarily that easy to tell! They’re mostly in fine shape. On a few, the inch or two exposed above-ground had frozen and thawed, leaving the top tips spongy and mushy, but this didn’t affect too many. I can probably get a couple of bushels! This mid-January harvest is actually consistent with last year, except for the extra 6-7 weeks of RealWinter… I also mulched the garlic, leaving a couple of beds clear as a test (I’m not sure how useful an experiment that is, since I’ll mulch them for moisture and against weeds first thing in spring…). Anyhow, a bit of winter fieldwork…

Yellow…

4 Jan 2008 by Mike (tfb)

Winter white is OK, but a splash of color is nice for a change, even if it’s only a picture. These summer squash are from a late September harvest last year: Sunburst scallopini, with one green Peter Pan patty pan, and on the right, Golden Dawn III zucchini. The scallopinis are picked a lot bigger than the 2-3″ (5-7.5cm) babies favored by some, but, well, the taste for baby vegetables I usually don’t get… Wait a little longer and they’re so much bigger: more eating, less picking! :)

Brussels sprouts for Christmas?

1 Dec 200825 Dec 2007 by Mike (tfb)

Got the idea this morning to get something REALLY FRESH onto the Christmas dinner menu. A fat local turkey, plus squash, potatoes, carrots, beets and onions from storage (in addition to a ham and industrial veggies from the supermarket) didn’t seem quite enough. But what could I find? The bed of Brussels sprouts left standing when the snow hit was…still there, not fully buried, and possibly perfectly preserved in a frozen state. Remembering a harvesting lesson of the past, I headed up the field with short, stiff saw in hand and bagged three (once again, the saw did its stuff!). Unfortunately, between the snow and the leaves, the sprouts were too well-mulched and probably never really got frozen solid, or at least, froze and partially thawed a few times. Many were damaged and discolored, but some were definitely…fine (I tasted a few raw on the spot). In the end, between the rather unappetizing, damp mass in a bucket waiting outside the kitchen, and all the other cooking to do, this time around, the good sprouts never got sorted, and it’s on to the frozen compost heap for the lot. But there’s more out there for another try… This is not exactly part of the Professional Market Garden side of tiny farming, more like my personal garden-addicted behavior, but it’s all part of learning!