If it’s Friday, it must be time to harvest! After a beautiful weather week with barely a cloud in sight, an otherwise welcome gentle rain today meant a bit of a muddy harvest. Here, the picking and pulling has all been done, and we’re about halfway through the sorting and rinsing. Ramrod green onions are all bundled and ready for a quick rinse. Nelson carrots are underway. And, a couple of several bins of tomatoes, with Juliet saladette in one, and a mix of smaller heirlooms in the other. With toms, we only fill the bins 2-3 layers deep to avoid squashing and splitting, especially with big heirlooms. (I suppose getting cardboard tomato flats, one tomato deep, would be more space-efficient, ’cause the pick-up truck that we use does get full around this time of year, but so far, we’ve managed without.) Everything’s looking and tasting good!
Onions from seed!
This is the first year I’ve tried growing onion from seed, and they’re doing fine. Today, I pulled up one multi-planting of Red Wing to check ’em out. Multi-planting onions was also a first-time experiment, with 3-4 seedlings transplanted in one spot, at 12″ (30cm) in-row spacing. They’ve done a good job of pushing themselves apart, they’ve stayed pretty round, not flattening out where they touched.
Another thing I was a little concerned about didn’t come to pass. For around a month, the onion seedlings had already been under the usual 14-16 hours a day of fluorescent light on the grow racks, when I read about the possibility of daylength sensitivity at the seedling stage. When the amount of sunlight reaches a certain threshold, over 12 hours or so for long-day varieties, the onions move from leaf growth to producing bulbs. A couple of sources said that premature bulbing can be triggered by too much light too early on, even at the beginning seedling stage, and you’d end up with tiny, marble-sized onions after a season in the field. Other sources disagreed, but in any case, that didn’t happen here! Still, in future, I’ll start long-day onions under reduced artificial light…to be safe.
As usual, the cracked surface of our clayey soil looks rougher than it is: it isn’t really hard, only a thin, dry layer with moist soil right underneath. Here, four out of five seedlings have pushed apart, rotating the stems outward, and grown into decent-sized…onions!
Odds-and-ends omelet
Preparing and gazing at food can bring as much enjoyment as growing, sharing and eating it! I’m really not a cook, but with fresh, quality ingredients, whipping up something appetizing is…simple. For our field lunch today, an omelet made from stuff at hand: eggs, cooked chicken with a little store-bought prosciutto, a black tomato (from Raechelle’s home garden), garlic, onions, basil and 4-year-old cheddar cheese. Chopped garlic and onions were sauteed in extra virgin olive oil, then the chicken and prosciutto were added to warm up. Out with the filling, in with eggs, lightly beaten with salt, pepper and a little powdered cayenne pepper. As the omelet started to set, the meat was sprinkled on, and the whole thing topped with thin slices of tomato, grated cheese, and basil. Quick, easy…
…and pretty tasty. Everything except the ham, salt, pepper, cayenne and oil came from the farm, or nearby. We ate in the field… :)
Weighing eggs
Egg production has been moving along smooth as anything. The girls are great, easy going, seem to be having a good time, and they’re pumping out 23-25 eggs a day. Besides giving them out to everyone around here, there’s been enough to take to market every other week as a CSA bonus, usually, half a dozen per share. Bob unearthed an old egg scale from somewhere in the barn, and I’ve been playing with it lately (for actual distribution, there’s no sizing, everyone gets a mix). Egg size has definitely increased. Where they were mainly medium with a few small at the start, they’re now maybe half medium, half large. The scale is the kind of old school tech that I love, with everything simple, open, obvious, and FIXABLE. It may be a little hard to read in the pic: there’s a little pointer, with a fleck of red paint on it, at the bottom of the open triangle of the indicator—this egg’s Large, just on the border of XL…
Soaring chokes
Jerusalem artichoke is the crop least fazed by this crazy, slow-growth summer of cloud and rain. The chokes have been in the ground since May, through the whole thing, and thrived through it all. This bed is right in the middle of the open field, but neither unchecked wind nor nasty hail has set it back. The tallest plants are approaching 8′ (2.4 m), a record for anything in this garden!
After the market
Somehow, I always forget to take enough pictures at the market, of things like setting up the stand. It’s really great, how a plain old small town street, in about an hour, turns into a…farmers’ market. For our stand, basic set-up and teardown—canopy, table, sales gear—is only a matter of maybe 20 minutes at each end. Because I don’t drive, our stand is different from most, where a truck or trailer is the usual veggie stand backdrop. Bob drops us off in the morning in a pick-up: a self-contained veggie sales outpost. When it’s all over, with empty containers nested and packing volume much reduced, we get picked up by truck or smaller mini-van. Here, Lynn and I wait for our ride. There are garlic and potatoes left in a basket and a trug, and the four bins contain mostly crop residue, a bit of miscellaneous garbage, and odds and ends of unsold produce. Neat!
Good beans…
Just a few sunny days and the new planting of snap beans have sized up perfectly for the Friday harvest. They’re the crop of the week, a shade on the young side, maybe 2-3 days from being fully filled out, super-long and slender, with firm, thin pods (compared to the sturdier skins of the slower-growing first set), and only a hint of the actual bean inside. Cool! Because everything is fresh-picked on Fridays, regardless of when the “perfect” picking day may’ve been, it’s interesting to see what the luck of the draw brings to certain crops. These beans are an example. By being a little early, I lose a bit of yield, maybe 10-15%, but the beans are at that elusive, slightly young stage. Mesclun may reach that perfect first cut, when the leaves are still mild-tasting and almost melt-in-your-mouth, on, say, a Monday or Tuesday, and, especially if there’s sunny weather, grow past it by the Friday—still excellent, but a little firmer and stronger-tasting. Same for some of the fastest growing summer squash, like the zucchinis, which can practically double in size in 4-5 days. I’ve found the picking window for tasty veggies is usually quite forgiving for even the fastest growers, at least a week in summer and longer in the fall. As always, it’s mainly about the weather: how much heat, sun, and moisture they get. Since I’m not harvesting or sorting for uniformity—I don’t NEED carrots of a certain length and diameter and so forth—there are no worries on this front, and it’s fun to see and eat the variations of each crop and planting at each harvest all through the season….