Lynn

Cold-weather harvest

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Some days now, the temperature is in the +/-20°C (50°F) range, and nights hover around the freezing point—not that cold, but comparatively so when other days shoot up to summery highs. I’m now keeping the row cover permanently on the eggplant and peppers, they’re no longer out there to grow—not enough sun—the field is now simply a convenient storage system. Picking from under cover, pulling back only as much as necessary, we take what we need for and leave the rest. There’s probably two more week’s worth of sweet and hot peppers, and at least another week of baby eggplant to go after today…

Bundling up a bit kinda seems to be the general choice. Libby and Lynn are in winter outerwear mode, down to insulated rubber boots, while Toshiko, who finds it colder here than at home in Japan, keeps warm with layers. Seasons change…

Pumpkins and pigweed

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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.

Last market day of summer

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We rang out the summer at the farmers’ market with a really lovely morning. I don’t remember what was going on here, but Lynn is looking a little under siege. You can’t ever call our market EXTREMELY busy, but it’s steady, and we get a few mini-rushes most days, where customers start to queue up. It’s always fun on food’s front line!

Violet returns: visiting with worms

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Young Violet (2) returned to the field, sans siblings. She seemed to have fun on her first garden visit, on a sunny afternoon—today’s cool, cloudy, wet conditions didn’t faze her in the least. Interacting with earthworms occupied a good hour…

While Libby and Lynn dug carrots, Violet helpfully and with great interest relocated disturbed worms. A hands-on biology lesson, an early pre-school start… (Looking back, for the most part, I’d have much rather grown up in a field than in a classroom!)

Trimming garlic

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From the long stack of garlic drying in the barn, we’ve been taking out about a bushel a week since harvest began in late July. Today, we finished preparing the rest of the harvest. Lynn, Raechelle and Mel snipped the stems and sorted at the same time. (The roots weren’t trimmed; that can be done for some as we go through the bins and baskets each week for CSA shares and the farmers’ market.) In past years, the sorting was for size: dividing the mostly medium and large bulbs, and putting aside the very few tiny and damaged ones. Garlic does best with a dry final month of growth—this time, coming out of ground that had remained quite wet all summer, the harvest wasn’t in as good shape…

Sizing evened out, with most bulbs about what I call “medium” (this is the most useful size for cooking, but the big ones are so…impressive, everyone loves ’em). A little over half dried not to the usual tight, white skin, instead, to a tan color, wrinkled and split. So, we sorted into “good” and “not so good”… There was also a much higher proportion of really damaged bulbs, maybe 10% compared to a usual couple per hundred. Still, the taste is great, and the cloves themselves are fine. Only appearance and storage life are affected. We’re selling the less pretty, less storable bulbs at a couple of dollars less per pound. They’re good for immediate use (within 3-4 weeks, maybe a little longer) and as seed garlic for fall planting. Overall yield was great, although I’m not sure whether the hugely reduced number of large bulbs was due to weather, or to the more intensive 5-across planting we tried for the first time. As usual, more to observe and learn from. All in all, given the poor garlic weather, it all worked out quite well!

Cutting spinach

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Spinach cutting close-up

Spinach has kinda been the star of the harvest for the last couple of weeks. After a “normal” summer—hot and dry for the last three years—it’s usually not around at this time of year due to poor germination. This season, with cloudy, cooler days and all the rain, spinach is in abundance: glossy, deep green, succulent, full of flavor. Libby and Lynn chop away, cutting an inch or two up the stems. This technique takes out the small new growth leaves, but it’s fast and efficient, and the plants still grow back for a second harvest. The alternate picking-single-leaves approach is more laid back, great for leisurely field chats—this harvest, we opted for quick…

Nothing like teamwork: head down, knife in hand, side by side…

My, what a nice, wide path!

After the row cover: weeding!

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Weeding after row cover

It’s been about six weeks, time to permanently remove the row cover from the last transplanting of fall brassicas! There are two sections, about 20 x 50′ beds in all, with broccoli, caulflower, cabbage, collards, kale. The cover protected against flea beetles, and at this point in the season, the FBs aren’t around much. Which leaves the post-cover weeding! I generally plan to remove the cover earlier, weed, and then replace it quickly, but this seldom seems to happen. Instead, it’s one big weed-a-thon at the end… Here, the mainly pigweed looks fairly big and dense, but it’s actually not much of a problem. The row cover has protected the ground from many days soil-packing rain, so the beds are nice and loose (it’s amazing how much rain can compact clayey soil).  Weeds come out easy! With two people, it’s a relatively quick job, 2-3 hours for a pretty thorough clean-up. We worked with a combination of hoe and wheel hoe, me doing the paths and between-row clearing, and Lynn hand hoeing in-row, between the plants spaced at 18″ (45cm)…

Each time I use the wheel hoe, I grow to love it that much more. So easy, so TIME-SAVING! It’s such a sophisticated yet simple tool, a perfect marriage of wheel, leverage and steel (you could say! :)… Today’s job is heavier work than it’s usually used for, the weeds aren’t just emerging, they’re pretty big. Rather than rolling the wheel hoe continuously down the rows, I’m cutting the weeds with a series of forward and backward strokes that either slice the plants below the surface, or pull them out, roots and all…

Clearing a path (before and after, above) in the loose soil takes maybe 3 minutes for 50′, many times faster than hoeing or hand pulling…

For this heavier weeding work, I use a fairly forceful forward stroke that travels about 1-1.5′ (30-45cm), then raise the blade to clear the felled weeds as I step forward to start the next bit…

The wheel hoe is equally good at cutting on a backstroke, which comes in handy for dense areas and tough specimens… It’s not particularly strenuous work: the blade is sharp, the wheel and angle of the handles give lots of leverage and momentum, and some part of the hoe is always in contact with the ground, so you’re never completely lifting the whole tool. Like most things I do here in the field, I’ve figured out how to use the wheel hoe on my own, by reading instructions, looking at pictures and applying my version of common sense. Techniques no doubt vary. It’ll be interesting to eventually see how others do things! Meanwhile, everything seems to work out…especially, the wheel hoe! (Wheel hoe action photos by Lynn)


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