The weather’s been fine, no big frost worries, and the harvest is nice. For the sake of a list, in no particular order, we have: spinach, onion, garlic, carrots, bok choi, broccoli, lettuce, cabbage, kale, hot and sweet peppers, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, green beans, beets, and…eggplant! I think I got ’em all. The set-up on a strip of canvas is for a newsletter photo–the lighting is an overcast sun, the studio is the field!
garlic
Seed in the field
Pretty drab view of an empty patch on a partly cloudy day, but there’s new seed under there! Spinach, radish, peas, beets, green onion, lettuce, went in a few days back, perfectly timed for the last couple of days of slow, steady rain to get them started. You can see the faint lines of the seeder. (In front, mulched with straw, this year’s garlic is coming along well.) Rain also exposes the many stones and pebbles in this ground. Thousands have been cleared away, and they keep pushing up. It may look like a lot, but they’re not a problem. Live and…let be rocks!
First up: garlic!
Clear away some straw and there it is, a garlic shoot pushing its way up to the light! It’s the first sign of new veggie growth in the field this season. Garlic planting happens in the fall. It spreads its roots for a while, goes dormant for the winter when the ground freezes, and wakes as the weather warms. That’s what the books say. Whatever it’s doing in the frozen ground is fine by me, as long as it shows up for spring. Which it always has. It’s been…reliable!
A blanket of fresh new snow
The weather app was right: more snow! Fresh new snow piled high never fails to make me wonder what it must be like to see this stuff for the very first time…
On a snowed-under mid-winter day, pictures of veggies growing in the field don’t come to mind. Except, I do like thinking about the fall-planted garlic, tucked under a layer of straw, biding its time.
The only other overwintering crop out there is Jerusalem artichoke. Rather than dig it all up in fall and replant in spring, lately I’ve been leaving a good amount to come back on its own. The chokes can fend for themselves.
A bushel of Music
A bushel of Music garlic: The bulbs were significantly smaller than expected, for no reason I could point to, but the fine, strong flavor is fully there. Still plenty of time for planting, going by the 14-day weather forecast… Cause if you can’t count on the weather, what can you count on?!
Garlic goes in again
Yep, like just about every year, the new growing season starts here with fall garlic planting. Miserable, damp day, though not so cold. Andrea M (close) and Rochelle (far) are working on different sections to hedge bets on which areas of the field dry out first in case of a disastrously wet spring. Crafty! The little metal pails, paint pails that happen to be from…Home Depot, turn out to be perfect for this job (they’re useful all over the place). Handy!
Rain watch begins
The season’s weekly rain watch begins. Weeks start on Monday. The big 25 on the rain gauge is the magic 25mm/1″ mark, the rule-of-thumb ideal for a week—an inch of slow and steady rain over a few hours, and of course all the rest, sunshine, that’s just…beautiful. A 1/2″ is an OK minimum for a bit. More than an inch a week ongoing for a while can be troublesome, depending on the crop and stage its—disease, small seed washed out, bigger seed rotting, whatnot, it is all possible :)—and it does occasionally happen. So far this week, 18mm here and 20mm total, so, doing fine!