The First Shift—today, it’s Sherry and Andrea—picks Indy Gold beans in the early afternoon (Conall’s pulling weeds). On Fridays, everyone comes at different overlapping times, usually from the mid-morning on. Most Fridays so far have been sunny and hot, so I try to fit in greens in the later afternoon, anything but cutting them in high noon heat. So, it’s beans on a hot summer’s day. The Fridays have been getting smoother and more efficient every week, and so far, we haven’t been nearly shorthanded. Still, the lessons of the year of People in the Field are becoming plain, nothing startling, but made unavoidably obvious when seen first hand. The main one is, you have to maintain an equal balance of people doing general fieldwork or the weekly crop availability won’t keep up with the…harvest capacity! More on all of that later in the Fall… Today, only a bushel or so of first pick beans as we get caught been plantings, plus mesclun, carrots, beets, arugula, potatoes, chives, beet greens, a bit of kale, squash and cucumbers, and the first bushels of mixed tomatoes, along with onions and garlic from storage.
Harvest
Pulling onions
Started the full onion harvest today. This is about half the crop, pulled and layed out to dry (although, with NO RAIN, drying is hardly an issue). Above, it’s peppers and eggplant; at the top left, an almost depleted section of Yukon Gold potatoes with a scraggly weed cover that needs to be tilled in. The onions will be topped, put around half deep in the old style wooden bushel baskets (lots of air, no sweating), and set in the barn to cure. Once again, this year I took the easy way with onion sets, which limits my selection and also seems to produce flatter rather than rounder bulbs. Here it’s the usual two: Stuttgarter yellow cooking and Spanish Yellow (that’s apparently the variety name). Next year, it’s gotta finally be onions from seed! For now, nothing fancy: strong, flavorful onions that bring tears to your eyes!
The Friday harvest
If it’s Friday… This week’s big harvest was the smoothest yet, with everything in, sorted, rinsed, bundled, bagged and COUNTED by around 8:30 pm. The crew this week: Sherry, Andrea, Molana, Lynn, Cezary, Conall and me. I’m over being slightly unnerved by the number of people—my reflex is still to wonder, “If I had to, could I do it all myself?”, but now it’s also…no worries, it’ll get done! Here, Andrea, Sherry and Cezary harvest beet greens, thinning at the same time. (And that’s last plantings of more beets to the left, carrots up top under burlap, and summer squash under row cover off to the upper right. Demolished pigweed strews the path.) In today’s harvest: beets, beet greens, eggplant, mesclun, arugula, carrots, green onions, potatoes, 60-80 units of each.
Hauling garlic
Today, we started bringing in the garlic. A gentle loosening of the soil with a digging fork—don’t spear those bulbs!—a gentle pull, and it’s done. When to harvest is a bit of a toss-up, at least, as far as I’ve made out from my three years of garlic growing. The general indicator of leaves dying off is a start, but I’m a little wary from last year’s harvest, where the garlic left only a week or so into August, with half the leaves still green, gave up a whole lot of split bulbs (the cloves began pushing back and the skin at the top split open). So now, I dig up a few, and if they look good, it’s time to harvest! This first haul is about a quarter of around 2,400. It’s off to the barn for curing in small stacks. The rest should be done in the next few days!
Dinner!
After a fairly lazy day in the field, half of it spent waiting for the ground to dry out a bit after an intense thunderstorm (only 15mm, though), it was off to a farm a couple of miles down the road to get some local rainbow trout for dinner. Then, a quick tour of the garden to pick the fixin’s: new potatoes (Norland, Yukon Gold), yellow and green beans (Indy Gold, Derby), summer squash (Sunburst, Flying Saucer…yes, FS), beet greens (mainly Detroit Dark Red). Nestled in by the beans, the first tomato to turn color, a Stupice, of course, not quite ready to munch, but only days away! And so, except for salt, pepper, olive oil and butter, your basic local dinner!
Red onions, golden beets
Veggie variety is great: different tastes, textures, shapes, colors… From the start, it seemed only natural to grow several varieties of each crop rather than just the most “efficient” one. This has worked out to at least a couple per crop (this year, two types of spinach so far, three potato, two corn…) to many (at the extreme end, 50+ varieties of tomato). The biggest difference is quite often in maturity date: crops fairly similar in taste and appearance can be two or three weeks or more apart in maturing for harvest. Sometimes the difference is only skin deep. The Red Baron spring onions in the pic are only red for a couple of layers, but they look great when you get ’em. The Golden Detroit beets taste a little different from red varieties, but the fun (for me, at least) is mainly in the striking and unusual golden-orange flesh. Look before you eat!
Freshly dug garlic
To add variety to this week’s CSA shares, I dug up 50 garlic a little ahead of the main harvest in a week or two. It’s looking great. Uncured garlic doesn’t store as well, but how long are you gonna let a single bulb of garlic hang around?! Really, there’s no such thing as too much garlic!