Home for next year’s garlic, carved out of the oats yesterday, is looking good! Mow the oats (the riding mower got a good workout and did a reasonable job), spread aged cow manure from the barnyard, and rototill in with the Kubota compact tractor. Simple! What sight is sweeter than a rich, freshly turned new garden plot, ready for another round?! :)
garlic
Seasonal eating
The veggie selection changes over the season, but it’s not necessarily reflected too dramatically on the stand at the farmers’ market this year. Compared to mid-August, the absence of snap beans and tomatoes is clear (with the mild weather, some vendors did have standard field tomatoes today). As for early June, well, more variety now is to be expected. Still, most of the cool-season crops for around here, like broccoli, cauliflower, and collards, also, winter squash, I have only enough of for CSA. On the stand, two types of radish (White Icicle, French Breakfast), three types of beet (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme, Bull’s Blood, in smaller sizes here), two types of carrot (Nelson, Purple Haze), Red Russian kale, two types of bok choi (Mei Quing, Joi) and mesclun, plus Yukon Gold potatoes, Music garlic and Stuttgarter onions in baskets. The stand could be a lot bigger, offering more display space, and the harvest could be expanded (there are still herbs, summer squash, sweet and hot peppers, tomatillos, Brussels sprouts,…) but the marginal sales for many “secondary” veggies at this slowing down time of year don’t make it worthwhile. I’m still working on the balance between production planning, labor, harvest selection, post-harvest prep, and presentation… Sounds complicated, but it’s just…work! ;)
Garlic for sale…?
It’s never too early to make sure you have enough garlic to seed next year’s crop. Local garlic is kind of a cult item, people who want it get quite intense about stocking up, whether for winter or to finally take a shot at growing their own. And it’s somehow hard to resist selling your every last bulb… It’s not a money thing, because it costs me just about exactly what I make to buy back the same quantity, it’s that people seem so happy to have gotten some.
I’ve chatted with independent garlic growers small and large, and overselling your stock seems to be quite common. As a bonus to saving rather than buying every season, selecting the best bulbs as seed garlic from your own harvest may eventually result in an improved strain for your particular plot (the way garlic reproduces via vegetative cloning, I’m not sure what genetic science says about this as an improvement strategy, but it certainly can’t hurt!).
Every year, I go through this same bit of reasoning…and can’t resist loading up another bushel for market… This year, I had the urge to check my garlic suppliers earlier than ever before (at some point every year, they run out), and a couple of quick calls today gave me added incentive. Apparently, seed garlic is selling out fast, possibly because of an apparently growing public aversion to garlic from China (that’s where much of the cheap supermarket garlic comes from). Last year, I was able to get garlic in November. Now, my big wholesaler of certified organic Music thinks he might be sold out by next week! Time to start selecting…
Four shares on the table
After the long holiday weekend, I did a quick new harvest for the handful of usually-on-Monday CSA shares. We have three CSA pick-up days, Saturday, Sunday and Monday, and harvest for the last two can be mostly combined on Sundays. With kinda cool and cloudy weather today, veggies could be left outside on the table for a few minutes—in full summer heat, they’d quickly start to get toasted. I’ve tried to reduce PLASTIC to a minimum (tiny farming has somehow made me averse to much packaging, especially with plastic). The tomatoes need to be kept together, they’d be crushed if let loose in the final shopping bag. And the greens, well, no other easy solution (I’m looking into reusable cotton salad bags that could be put in the fridge, another future project; I’ve moved to paper bags this year for potatoes). As for the shopping bags, I’m considering reusable tote bags, two per shareholder, that could be swapped empty-for-full each week, but the extra BAG MANAGEMENT I know would be fairly, let’s see…time-consuming. Details…
Share of the week
A specially Thursday-picked Large share, tiny farm flexibility in action for a shareholder who missed the weekend pick-up. A Large is about one and a half the size of the standard Single share. This week: carrot (Touchon), beet (Golden Detroit, Scarlet Supreme), tomato (assorted heirloom), mesclun (9-lettuce), spring onion (Ramrod, Red Baron), summer squash (Sunburst, Golden Dawn III, Ambassador), potato (Gold Rush), pepper (Ace), onion (Stuttgarter), garlic (Music). The shares have been pretty good this year, not over the top (in a superabundant way) as they have been at times in the past, but definitely solid value for the fresh, local, organic dollar!
More from the Market
Today’s wares set up behind the stand at the farmers’ market. First thing in the morning (that’s around 7 am), we open and arrange all of the crates and use them to stock the stand and assemble CSA shares. Here, we’re partway into the morning—as the day progresses, crates get stacked. Visible in the pic, an assortment of mainly heirloom tomatoes, carrots, assorted sweet peppers (we picked a lot of ’em green before turning to red rather than let them shrivel in the near-drought conditions), various beets, garlic, and green and yellow beans pre-packed for the CSA. As for the traffic, the day was on the quiet side, despite great weather—it seems the fresh, local, organic trend so pumped in the media this year, and apparently somewhat sweeping the cities, is taking its time hitting the countryside. All in all, though, a decent Saturday!
Hauling garlic
Today, we started bringing in the garlic. A gentle loosening of the soil with a digging fork—don’t spear those bulbs!—a gentle pull, and it’s done. When to harvest is a bit of a toss-up, at least, as far as I’ve made out from my three years of garlic growing. The general indicator of leaves dying off is a start, but I’m a little wary from last year’s harvest, where the garlic left only a week or so into August, with half the leaves still green, gave up a whole lot of split bulbs (the cloves began pushing back and the skin at the top split open). So now, I dig up a few, and if they look good, it’s time to harvest! This first haul is about a quarter of around 2,400. It’s off to the barn for curing in small stacks. The rest should be done in the next few days!