Friday harvests are getting quicker as the season winds down. This has happened at least for the last couple of years. Where earlier in the season, we finish around 8-9pm, we’re now mostly wrapped up by 5 or 6, and sometimes with less people than during the summer. I’m not quite sure why this happens. Probably, a big part of is that everyone out there in the field is now experienced and comfortably fast. Also, many of the crops in the weekly veg line-up are pre-harvested: garlic and onions first, and now, winter squash, pumpkins, potatoes and the new sweet potatoes. Still, it’s a pretty big harvest, and quantities are the same now as earlier in the year. Then there’s the shortening days—it’s starting to get dark around 7:30 pm now, down from 9:30 in late June-early July—and CHILLY WEATHER that likely speed us up! Anyhow, this is the most time I’ve spent wondering why—whatever the reasons, getting done quick is good! The trailer-load in the pic is about half of the day’s field haul, and there’s also the pre-harvested stuff. In this week’s harvest, in no particular order: carrots (2 varieties), cauliflower, beets (3 varieties), sweet peppers (several varieties), hot peppers (several varieties), green onions, spinach (2 varieties), summer squash (3 varieties), beans, tomato (several varieties), parsley, basil, all from the field, plus, pre-harvested, garlic, potatoes, winter squash (several varieties) and onions (2 varieties).
Tools
Equipment for large-scale agriculture is too big or too expensive, and many home gardening tools don’t work efficiently on larger jobs or break easily. Tiny farming on plots up to two or three acres requires its own special gear…
Beautifying the good garlic
Toshiko, WWOOFing from Osaka, Japan, via Vancouver, where she’d been studying English for the last few months, is our last guest in the field of the year. She arrived last Friday night, and stays until a week from this Sunday, two weeks in all. A couple of years ago, she volunteered on larger farms in Australia, where whole days were spent on one task, like picking a single crop. This is Toshiko’s first taste of really tiny farming, where there’s something different to do every couple of hours. At this point in the season, fieldwork consists mainly of harvest and post-harvest things to do, also, maintaining row cover in case of frost. Here, she does a final, thorough sort through the garlic, separating the good from the damaged bulbs, and trimming the roots of the good stuff.
Pumpkins and pigweed
Today, the pumpkins came in, wrested from a jungle of pigweed gone wild. Every year, a few of the 40 50’x50′ sections that make up the 2.5 acre garden get a little overrun with one weed or another (usually, pigweed). This year’s pumpkin patch was a good example, with pigweed growing unchecked for a good six weeks—no time made to weed, not IMPORTANT enough a crop—until today, when Raechelle used the belly-mounted 52″ mower deck on the Kubota compact tractor to mow it down!
Of course, this is exactly what you DON’T EVER DO in a garden: allow weeds to flourish and go to seed, then mow them down, broadcasting seed everywhere… Oh, well. The alternative, pulling the pigweed by hand, then carting it off, we also do when necessary—see the Pigweed Mountain—but once in a while, I go for the instant gratification of seeing a section clean and clear in an hour or two. The millions of pigweed seeds, ensuring healthy future generations for years to come, will be dealt with…later. (As long as we weed on time next time around, how bad can it get?! :) Anyhow, it’s all part of the grand experiment! Guest pumpkin photo by Lynn.
First frost misses
Frost finally hit the garden…but it missed the veggies! Just after sunrise this morning, there was ice on the grass at the very bottom of the field, but it stopped maybe 10′ feet from where the garden begins. Pretty cool. There’s a gentle slope from a high point about two-thirds of the way up the garden, and cold air flowed downhill and pooled at the very bottom of the field. Fun with science: when there’s no wind to mix things up, cold air rolls with gravity along the ground!
Fun with harvest bins
After rinsing harvest bins for the regular Friday harvest, instead of spreading them around to dry as usual, I stacked ’em high to represent the house-of-cards global economy—I was trying to illustrate a point! What on Earth? Well, a few days ago, I became sadly hooked on the US presidential election action, especially on the endlessly fascinating PALIN. I slipped off the wagon and started obsessively sneaking in quick peeks at CNN through the day, and actually WATCHING in the late evening. This is so not in sync with the natural flow of…tiny farming. It’s been a couple of years now since I actively stopped consuming news: no TV, newspapers, Web, radio, just no news, except what came by word-of-mouth. (No-news really does wonders for your head…) Suddenly, I was back in, in an intense but luckily limited-to-presidential-politics way. Or so I thought. Earlier this week—overnight, it seemed—the ENTIRE U.S. ECONOMY STARTED TO MELT DOWN, and now the election thing has gotten SO MUCH CRAZIER. Wow. Anyhow, after I’d stacked the bins, Lynn and Libby tried to rapidly destabilize the economy by throwing potatoes at it—guess my model wasn’t too realistic, ’cause it wasn’t easy to knock down… We went on to a great harvest day, beautiful fall weather, a fine time to be in the field!
Restaurant run
A phone call on the weekend lead to this, our first real restaurant sale. It was cool! A chef called looking for local, organic veggies for a special menu this week. They’d joined at the last minute a regional food festival, featuring local food in restaurants in several towns. I ran down what we had available and followed up with an emailed price and available quantity list. Today, we harvested and delivered: green beans (Jade), potatoes (Kennebec), beets (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme), carrots (Nelson, Purple Haze, White Satin), and onions (Stuttgarter-type yellow cooking, yellow Spanish), in the 25lb (11kg) range for each. Pricing was the normal market unit price, no “wholesale” discount. It was great pulling up to the back of the building, delivering into the kitchen, checking out and describing each veg with the chef. The dinner plans: a “hearty fall soup” and a “steamed vegetable pasta with olive oil and herbs.” Market gardens and progressive local restaurants are a natural and quite common direct fit…as seen on TV (I’ve been known to watch the Food Channel)! I’ve had some minor dealings with restaurants in seasons past, but we’d never got round to a classic chef’s order and kitchen delivery. so it was interesting to go through the whole routine. We had lunch there afterwards, and the food was refreshingly good: bruchetta, flatbread pizza, sweet potato fries, salt and pepper rib tips, an asparagus sandwich (yeah, the asparagus aren’t exactly in season around here, but their special local food menu is a step in a cool direction…). Fun! Oh, and no frost last night.
Fall frost watch 2008
Tonight is the first real frost watch of the year. I covered a bunch of beds for a couple of nights last week, but the chance of frost seemed slim, with the overnight forecast around 35°F (<2°C). Today, they say it’s supposed to go down to 33°F (0.5°C), with clear skies and no wind, perfect frost conditions. Under cover: peppers, eggplant, summer squash, beans, cucumber (a really late experimental planting), basil, sweet potato (above). It’s floating row cover is the usual Agribon AG-19, in 14′ ((4.3m) widths. Let’s see how it goes…!