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…!
Harvest
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…
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!
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!
More from the Market
Today’s wares set up behind the stand at the farmers’ market. First thing in the morning (that’s around 7 am), we open and arrange all of the crates and use them to stock the stand and assemble CSA shares. Here, we’re partway into the morning—as the day progresses, crates get stacked. Visible in the pic, an assortment of mainly heirloom tomatoes, carrots, assorted sweet peppers (we picked a lot of ’em green before turning to red rather than let them shrivel in the near-drought conditions), various beets, garlic, and green and yellow beans pre-packed for the CSA. As for the traffic, the day was on the quiet side, despite great weather—it seems the fresh, local, organic trend so pumped in the media this year, and apparently somewhat sweeping the cities, is taking its time hitting the countryside. All in all, though, a decent Saturday!
Harvest board
At some point on Thursday evening or Friday morning, I print out the harvest list on, of all things, a dry erase whiteboard! The last time I saw these things in action, they were lining walls floor to ceiling in trendily makeshift loft-style offices in big cities during the original dotcom frenzy. Then, they were covered with all kinds of wild brainstorming notes and diagrams for generally harebrained Web schemes. Now, it turns out they’re also perfect for listing veggies ready to be harvested. They’re fun to write on, quite impervious to a little runaway rinse water, and when it’s all over, easy to wipe clean with a damp cloth and start again! On busy harvest Fridays this year, the harvest board’s been the main way to stay on track, a step larger than the index card in an overall pocket that I used to use when harvesting on my own. Without a list of some sort, it’s amazing how you can forget an entire crop when racing against sundown. And there’s a little markup system: X in the box means harvested (half an X means maybe need more), a strikethrough line means fully sorted, rinsed, bunched or bagged, and counted. A simple and effective tiny farming tool, although a classic chalkboard would do as well!
Cherry tomatoes
Life imitates…candy! Picking cherry tomatoes may take forever, but it’s totally worthwhile for both looks and taste. This is newer tiny farm thinking for me. In my concern for quantity, having enough every week for market and CSA shares, I tended to favor things that grew BIGGER. Kinda primitive-practical (and I’m still biased against baby veggies, like tiny scallopini squash—just give ’em a couple more days, no?! :). Only last year, I finally expanded the cherry selection from a couple of standard round, red varieties to a fair mix of heirlooms and modern hybrids. Today’s assortment includes Golden Cherry, Red and Yellow Pear, Ildi, Red Currant, Chadwick’s Cherry, Matt’s Wild Cherry, and Sweet Baby Girl. There’s supposed to be Green Grape in there, maybe they were passed over because they didn’t look ready to pick!