Young Violet (2) returned to the field, sans siblings. She seemed to have fun on her first garden visit, on a sunny afternoon—today’s cool, cloudy, wet conditions didn’t faze her in the least. Interacting with earthworms occupied a good hour…
While Libby and Lynn dug carrots, Violet helpfully and with great interest relocated disturbed worms. A hands-on biology lesson, an early pre-school start… (Looking back, for the most part, I’d have much rather grown up in a field than in a classroom!)
After a good weeding and another round of rainy days, the fall brassicas are pretty well on their own. It’s amazing how quickly growth slows down in September—what a difference the sun pulling away makes! The kale and collards are doing fine—we’ll be harvesting some Red Russian kale tomorrow. Broccoli and cauliflower will come through. Whether cabbage, planted this late for harvesting at baby size, will make it by mid-October is up in the air. More gambling and waiting to see…!
From the long stack of garlic drying in the barn, we’ve been taking out about a bushel a week since harvest began in late July. Today, we finished preparing the rest of the harvest. Lynn, Raechelle and Mel snipped the stems and sorted at the same time. (The roots weren’t trimmed; that can be done for some as we go through the bins and baskets each week for CSA shares and the farmers’ market.) In past years, the sorting was for size: dividing the mostly medium and large bulbs, and putting aside the very few tiny and damaged ones. Garlic does best with a dry final month of growth—this time, coming out of ground that had remained quite wet all summer, the harvest wasn’t in as good shape…
Sizing evened out, with most bulbs about what I call “medium” (this is the most useful size for cooking, but the big ones are so…impressive, everyone loves ’em). A little over half dried not to the usual tight, white skin, instead, to a tan color, wrinkled and split. So, we sorted into “good” and “not so good”… There was also a much higher proportion of really damaged bulbs, maybe 10% compared to a usual couple per hundred. Still, the taste is great, and the cloves themselves are fine. Only appearance and storage life are affected. We’re selling the less pretty, less storable bulbs at a couple of dollars less per pound. They’re good for immediate use (within 3-4 weeks, maybe a little longer) and as seed garlic for fall planting. Overall yield was great, although I’m not sure whether the hugely reduced number of large bulbs was due to weather, or to the more intensive 5-across planting we tried for the first time. As usual, more to observe and learn from. All in all, given the poor garlic weather, it all worked out quite well!
Spinach has kinda been the star of the harvest for the last couple of weeks. After a “normal” summer—hot and dry for the last three years—it’s usually not around at this time of year due to poor germination. This season, with cloudy, cooler days and all the rain, spinach is in abundance: glossy, deep green, succulent, full of flavor. Libby and Lynn chop away, cutting an inch or two up the stems. This technique takes out the small new growth leaves, but it’s fast and efficient, and the plants still grow back for a second harvest. The alternate picking-single-leaves approach is more laid back, great for leisurely field chats—this harvest, we opted for quick…
Nothing like teamwork: head down, knife in hand, side by side…
My, what a nice, wide path!
It’s been about six weeks, time to permanently remove the row cover from the last transplanting of fall brassicas! There are two sections, about 20 x 50′ beds in all, with broccoli, caulflower, cabbage, collards, kale. The cover protected against flea beetles, and at this point in the season, the FBs aren’t around much. Which leaves the post-cover weeding! I generally plan to remove the cover earlier, weed, and then replace it quickly, but this seldom seems to happen. Instead, it’s one big weed-a-thon at the end… Here, the mainly pigweed looks fairly big and dense, but it’s actually not much of a problem. The row cover has protected the ground from many days soil-packing rain, so the beds are nice and loose (it’s amazing how much rain can compact clayey soil). Weeds come out easy! With two people, it’s a relatively quick job, 2-3 hours for a pretty thorough clean-up. We worked with a combination of hoe and wheel hoe, me doing the paths and between-row clearing, and Lynn hand hoeing in-row, between the plants spaced at 18″ (45cm)…
Each time I use the wheel hoe, I grow to love it that much more. So easy, so TIME-SAVING! It’s such a sophisticated yet simple tool, a perfect marriage of wheel, leverage and steel (you could say! :)… Today’s job is heavier work than it’s usually used for, the weeds aren’t just emerging, they’re pretty big. Rather than rolling the wheel hoe continuously down the rows, I’m cutting the weeds with a series of forward and backward strokes that either slice the plants below the surface, or pull them out, roots and all…
Clearing a path (before and after, above) in the loose soil takes maybe 3 minutes for 50′, many times faster than hoeing or hand pulling…
For this heavier weeding work, I use a fairly forceful forward stroke that travels about 1-1.5′ (30-45cm), then raise the blade to clear the felled weeds as I step forward to start the next bit…
The wheel hoe is equally good at cutting on a backstroke, which comes in handy for dense areas and tough specimens… It’s not particularly strenuous work: the blade is sharp, the wheel and angle of the handles give lots of leverage and momentum, and some part of the hoe is always in contact with the ground, so you’re never completely lifting the whole tool. Like most things I do here in the field, I’ve figured out how to use the wheel hoe on my own, by reading instructions, looking at pictures and applying my version of common sense. Techniques no doubt vary. It’ll be interesting to eventually see how others do things! Meanwhile, everything seems to work out…especially, the wheel hoe! (Wheel hoe action photos by Lynn)
This isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the question of variety on TFB, but the consideration recurs, so here’s another take… It would seem to be all around easier to grow just one variety of each veg crop, but that wouldn’t be any fun! One round, red beet, one big, round, red tomato, one shell pea, and so on. That’s the standard approach for most of the other full market garden growers at our small farmers’ market. There is SOME variation: green and yellow snap beans, maybe French Breakfast (red and white) radishes along with the standard round red ones, a few types of winter squash… Which is cool. Why bother growing three or more types of orange carrot, let alone orange (Nelson), purple (Purple Haze), and white (White Satin, for the first time this year)? I dunno. By growing several varieties of each veg crop, I’ve learned a bit, like the performance difference between hybrid and open pollinated varieties (in general, the OP tend to do better when field conditions get a little extreme, but that’s not a….scientific conclusion!). It’s not to be a novelty act, the guy at the market with the purple carrots, golden beets and round, yellow cucumbers. Or the round Eightball zucchini (below). If efficient tiny farming was the sole goal, I don’t have a really compelling…justification for all of the complicating seed ordering, transplant organizing, and extra direct seeding work it takes to grow as many different crops as I can, and numerous varieties of each. On the other hand, growing and offering variety, choice, and the non-standard make tiny farming so much fun. Which sounds good to me! It seemed like the thing to do from when I first pored over a seed catalog six years ago, and nothing’s changed my mind since! :)
Here’s something I haven’t seen before in my, uh, six years of growing potatoes: green, tomato-like, walnut-sized potato fruit. Bob hadn’t seen ’em either, in 40 plus years of farming. I hit the web for education.
These are genuine fruit (also called berries), but not that common. Usually, potato flowers just drop off. Pollination can be an issue, but even when pollinated, little details of the season’s growing conditions can make the the difference. When fruit do form, they’re more likely found on certain varieties, like Yukon Gold. This year, there were fruit on just about every Chieftain plant, here and there on the Kennebec, and none that I noticed on the Yukon Gold. Since they suddenly appeared this year on two varieties I regularly grow, I’d guess it was about the weather!
Each fruit contains 300-500 seeds that don’t come true: planting them doesn’t result in the same potatoes as the parent plant or each other, there’s lots of genetic variation, each seed will produce a genetically different plant! Potato breeders plant out thousands of seeds, check out the results, then keep replanting the most desirable potatoes for many years or generations to get new commercial varieties—this is the traditional way new potatoes are bred.
Meanwhile, it takes only two seasons and one generation to breed a new potato, so for the small farm or home garden, as opposed to the big potato breeder, this seems worth a try. At least as an experiment. Harvest seed one season—you can hand-pollinate to cross two varieties—plant out the next and select the best-looking plants. The tubers (potatoes) from each individual plant are ready to go: planting out the tubers will produce genetically identical plants.
But there’s a kinda big BUT: even though a potato grown from a tuber is genetically the same, you can’t be sure how its genetic makeup will react to different growing conditions. For example, it may be the perfect potato after a wet summer, and quite different after a dry one. (That’s why professional breeders check over several generations, and now there’s also high tech genetic analysis, to make sure it will be the same potato in the full range of growing conditions.) Still, at the very least, fun to see what happens!
And, the fruit are poisonous, rich in solanine, not for eating. Potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and tobacco are all members of the “deadly nightshade” family, all prone to having toxic parts (potato fruit are somewhat similar to little, hard green tomatoes). Interesting!
Since this is such a popular post, being dug up over and over via Google, I’ve started to update the article as I discover more. The post sounds the same as it always did, just surgically filled out a bit with more info. This is unusual. In general, I don’t edit old blog posts, and clearly mark the updates when I do!
