A steady harvest through a warm, hazy afternoon wound up quite early, with just about everything sorted, rinsed and bunched or bagged by around 8:30 pm. Smooth! The end-of-season crew has settled down to Jo, Lynn, Conall and me. Here, Jo and Lynn are harvesting a sparsely germinated but bountiful spinach patch (the second growth leaves are HUGE, fleshy, tasty and tender), while Conall cuts all-lettuce mesclun on the Greens Machine. When not snapping pics, I’m bunching kale in the last stand of brassicas. Filling in between the veggies, lush expanses of oats. In front of Lynn, a sprinkler from the last days of irrigation. The large clear leaf bags are used once for greens harvest, then saved for collecting mulch, or at least, trash. All is in order… It flashed through my mind how over the course of a few short weeks, everyone who came regularly to work in the field started with, in most cases, no experience, and casually transformed into a cheerful, efficient crew. Tiny farming must come naturally!
Veggies
Brussels sprouts
A pleasant fall surprise, at least one of two beds of Brussels sprouts (planted over five months ago) has come through! A bed each of Oliver and Jade Cross (hybrids both) received no water and looked mighty stressed and strained for all of the droughtish summer. The recent rains brought ’em back—well, mainly the Oliver, although the JC has some smallish…sprouts. A tiny harvest, still, the first Brussels sprouts for this market garden!
More tiny eggplant
Unlike the super-early tiny eggplant at the other end of this season, these guys have come to the party a little late. Warm, frost-free autumn weather means crops like eggplant and peppers put on a new bloom and even start to form fruit… Unfortunately, they’re doomed. Even if the warm conditions continue for another month (and THAT seems like as not), the short, weak-light days aren’t gonna give up the energy they need to get in harvestable range. Oh well, they still look pretty…
Spicy greens
Although we haven’t had frost and the weather’s been overall incredibly mild, it’s still the fall cool season crops that’re doing best. Here, a mix of spicy brassicas, grown entirely in the post-flea beetle season—no row cover and no holes! There’s arugula, mizuna, tatsoi (a kind of bok choi), and red mustard. It’s a zesty, peppy salad on its own, or mix with lettuce. The leaves are a little past the baby greens stage—they’re growing so fast—so just tear ’em up! (That’s what I say at the farmers’ market… :) Oh, and while the weeds have slowed down dramatically, they’re still around: can you spot the mallow?
Basic barbecue
In my continuing series of small, curious steps backward, yesterday, I acted impulsively on an idea that’d come to me a couple of days earlier. Instead of the usual junk food “treat” that’s become a Saturday afternoon ritual on the way back from the farmers’ market , we stopped in at a local, independent butcher and bought small portions of beef, pork, chicken and four types of sausage, and at the mega-hardware store, a cheap, old style barbecue ($20CDN). Back at the farm, the meat got skewered, along with farm onions, mostly hot peppers, and three types of zucchini—a prepared rub on the meat, salt, pepper and olive oil on the veggies—and then it was over the coals instead of the usual propane treatment. There was enough to do it all over again late this morning for…brunch, to feed four. It may be a little silly, enjoying every turn to the seemingly simpler, like doing away with fast food and propane tanks in favor of a marginally more basic cookery, but it feels…good. I think this is tiny farming-induced behavior. Demand simplicity!!
Return to Jerusalem artichoke
Various garden experiments are going on here and there. The new oats and fall rye green manure cover crops are doing well. There are five or six tarragon starters, three divisions from a potted lovage, coriander seed dried on the standing plants… Several varieties of hot peppers have to be given a final performance check. And so on. One I keep noticing and promptly forgetting again is the Jerusalem artichoke, planted so long ago. They’re definitely tough. The fuzzy-textured leaves seem rather delicate and wilt alarmingly without water, but they’ve survived with little weeding and maybe one watering all season, and they’re looking happy now.
Another unusual characteristic, compared to almost all of the other veggies and herbs, is how un-uniform they are, at least in this first year, with plants of all heights, ranging from around a foot to over three feet (30-90+ cm). There’s not much variation in leaf size, simply in…height. Well, JA’s supposed to be prolific—we’ll soon see when I check in on the gnarly tubers down below…!
Pumpkins come in
A leisurely late afternoon harvest yielded one trailer and one tiny tractor bucket piled with pumpkins. I didn’t count—there’s more to come—but I’d guess around 70. Pumpkins don’t have a big market value here just yet, but they’re fun to have around and they generally come through with little care. These guys received absolutely no irrigation and suffered somewhat for it, but they managed! The varieties: Connecticut Field and Neon for the bigger orange ones, Snackjack and Small Sugar for compact (3-5 lb), CSA share-ready selections, and Jamboree for that bit of difference (they’re the greenish-grayish ones). We’ll clean ’em up and lay them out on the nicely roofed farm stand to give the stand a bit of a purpose for fall!