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!
Veggies
Milkhouse looking out
The view out of the extended Milkhouse sliding door is not yet a great one—gotta move the big storage shed that blocks the view straight out to the field—but it’s become a common one this year. Amongst other things, the Milkhouse is a place to take refuge from extreme heat and, very occasionally, from…rain. And the extreme teasing continues. The latest is rain from INDIVIDUAL CLOUDS in an otherwise largely clear blue sky, that comes down just heavily enough to make you take shelter. A gutter hasn’t yet been installed at the front of the Milkhouse, so water streams down from the roof, which picks up more from the main barn roof, creating a deceptively abundant pool in no time. Actual rainfall for this little session: 2mm. (The tiny grey hose running across the pic is the original lifeline from the barn well to the field that in the first two and a half years was all that supplied water when the weather didn’t!)
Pounding stakes
Jo pounds in wooden stakes for a somewhat catch-up version of tomato staking. I think of it as the Modified Sprawl. There are about 600 plants, with maybe 250 in home-style tomato cages. The rest are so far on their own. The cages work great, until a mighty wind comes along and blows a bunch over—they’re not really rugged field gear. It’s too late for proper basket weaving support, so it’s on to my previously tried and OK version, pulling the plants up with twine on both sides, to stakes set every three plants apart, with a bit of pruning and suckering as we go…
This is the point in the season where we start playing catch-up as a million different things need handling. It can get a little frantic, depending greatly on how it went earlier in the year. To add to the…decision-making puzzle, it’s last call, and even very iffy last call, for planting many crops (60 day maturity and under), with day length shortening and frost risk building to a significant consideration just 6-8 weeks down the road. So, thin here, or weed or seed there, or water elsewhere, you can’t do everything at once! It’s all in the timing, with much of the schedule in the hands of Ma Nature (where’s that RAIN!?!). Gambling, yes! Still and all, quite FUN.
Burlap method strikes again!
The carrots-under-burlap germination method is now 3 for 4, with this fine performance: solid rows and almost no weeds! The third attempt failed miserably with three different varieties, mainly due to underwatering (the extra drying effect of a very windy week wasn’t given proper respect) combined with using the Earthway seeder’s light carrot plate, which puts down much less seed (what a bad idea, I fall for the allure of little or no thinning every few plantings…). Anyhow, it was back to the regular seed plate and proper checking and watering, and now, a new 800′ of Nelson and Touchon is on its way (although, something’s been munching on carrot seedlings lately). Never dull! :)
Wheel turning
Life moves fast through our short growing season. Lushness and abundance peak and fade quickly into decline. The garlic, so green and promising only a few weeks ago, is already dying back, ready for harvest by month’s end. (Here, we’re splurging on a watering by sprinkler; I’m not sure of effectiveness of this exact timing, but a nice soaking round about now should give those garlic bulbs an extra growing boost during their last days.) In front of the garlic, more crops past their prime. The third planting of mesclun (we’re already harvesting the fifth) has started to bolt, ready to be plowed under. And a bed of arugula that, despite row cover, had been invaded by flea beetles, was chopped down and now lies brown and overdue for tilling in. Wheel keeps on turning…! (LATER NOTE: Watering garlic during its last few weeks is not considered a great idea, but in this case, it didn’t hurt.)
Sort, bundle, bag
Fridays put this tiny farming system to the test, if we don’t get everything done for market and CSA shares, things would simply…CRUMBLE!!! Rain or shine, Friday is the main day for bringing in the weekly harvest, when we have to pick, sort, rinse, and bundle or bag 60-80 of everything that’s ready for the Saturday farmers’ market (about half of the CSA shareholders also pick up at the market). This week, the veggie selection is still small: beets, carrots, shell peas, green onions, mesclun, parsley. Here, at 6 pm, the picking, digging and pulling part is mostly finished and it’s mainly post-harvest action in the shade of the barn: Erin and Mike (not me, another Mike) bag and weigh just-rinsed mesclun, while Conall bundles baby carrots.
First carrots plus beets!
Today we harvested the first carrots of the year (baby Nelsons), along with baby Chioggia beets, for a small custom order. Veggies seen outdoors, especially when wet, are impossibly colorful in their own particular way, quite unlike…other colorful things! I’m still and forever surprised at how deeply pleasing and satisfying it can be to simply gaze at fresh veggies in sunlight (especially after harvesting them, and on overcast, diffuse light days!). Leafy greens are great, but the time for MORE is upon us once again!