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!
Harvest
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!
Purple Haze
When yet another person asked for the “purple carrots” at last Saturday’s farmers’ market, I realized they had moved up from alternative variety to mainstay status, alongside Nelson (hybrid) and Touchon (open-pollinated heirloom). That’s kinda cool, considering how orange and carrot go together around here. This is the second season that I’ve harvested PH for market at least every two or three weeks.
This year, I’ve included PH in every carrot planting (five so far, one a make-up for bad germination), and despite one bad showing, germination is overall as reliable as any of the others. Once established, PH has been great in our rather heavy clay-loam soil, growing straight and performing well even when a bit crowded.
Purple Haze is an imperator-shaped carrot (thick at the top, tapering to a point, cartoon carrot-style), with an orange core, and retains its purple color even through light cooking (it gets darker and less purple with full cooking). And it consistently tastes great—raw, it has a distinctively dry, refreshing crunch, and it’s always sweet as well as…carroty.
It’s a hybrid (I intend to try Purple Dragon, which I’ve had my eye on for a while, apparently an heirloom, but the seed is crazy expensive…), grows to 10-12″ (25-30cm) in 65-70 days, was an AAS winner (best of the best new varieties) for 2006, the year it hit seed catalogs here.
The bunch in the pic, pulled for today’s last couple of CSA shares, are from the second planting and just starting to put on size. And, yeah, they’re named after the classic Jimi Hendrix track!?! “‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky…” :)
Tomatoes
Taking a break during a drizzle (it’s not RAIN, and I doubt it’ll turn into it either), I piled up a few leftovers from Friday’s tomato harvest. The mid- and main-season toms aren’t yet ready, so we picked what we could, and didn’t keep track amongst the 50+ varieties. Still, I can recognize most of ’em. There are smaller and larger heirloom Striped Germans (yellow with a beautiful red blush), the large round one in front is Polfast, a new early hybrid that isn’t behaving that early, the smaller reds are Stupice, there are a couple of red cherries, sliding in on the left is Tangerine, and more… Notably absent are the black tomatoes (Cherokee Purple, Black Krim and the others), with their distinctive deep green to earthy red coloring—the few that were ready were sold or eaten! The little yellow cherry tom nestled in the middle on the left was actually given to me yesterday at the market; called Garden Peach, it has a fuzzy peach-like texture, and great taste (I had a couple!). If I can’t find it in the catalogs, I’ll save the seed and hope for the best.