Started the full onion harvest today. This is about half the crop, pulled and layed out to dry (although, with NO RAIN, drying is hardly an issue). Above, it’s peppers and eggplant; at the top left, an almost depleted section of Yukon Gold potatoes with a scraggly weed cover that needs to be tilled in. The onions will be topped, put around half deep in the old style wooden bushel baskets (lots of air, no sweating), and set in the barn to cure. Once again, this year I took the easy way with onion sets, which limits my selection and also seems to produce flatter rather than rounder bulbs. Here it’s the usual two: Stuttgarter yellow cooking and Spanish Yellow (that’s apparently the variety name). Next year, it’s gotta finally be onions from seed! For now, nothing fancy: strong, flavorful onions that bring tears to your eyes!
peppers
Peppers…
It’s all joy with the peppers (and eggplant). Here, Gypsy sweet peppers put on size and begin to peek out. In the past, these two crops barely made it in, if at all. I planted the varieties, but for eggplant, only the very early Dusky produced satisfying yields toward the end of summer, and peppers made it in decent quantity last year because of the freakishly extended warm weather that went into October. The reason is no mystery: doing the transplanting mostly alone, I’d get to peppers and eggplant last (they’re not prime farmers’ market sellers); this year, they got a good week or more head start. So we have the fruit of extra labor (and pretty good pepper-growing weather)—straightforward and…satisfying!
Dinner!
After a fairly lazy day in the field, half of it spent waiting for the ground to dry out a bit after an intense thunderstorm (only 15mm, though), it was off to a farm a couple of miles down the road to get some local rainbow trout for dinner. Then, a quick tour of the garden to pick the fixin’s: new potatoes (Norland, Yukon Gold), yellow and green beans (Indy Gold, Derby), summer squash (Sunburst, Flying Saucer…yes, FS), beet greens (mainly Detroit Dark Red). Nestled in by the beans, the first tomato to turn color, a Stupice, of course, not quite ready to munch, but only days away! And so, except for salt, pepper, olive oil and butter, your basic local dinner!
Tiny eggplant
Tiny eggplants—this one’s about 1″ (2.5cm) long—are appearing on a few plants, also, tiny peppers! I’m not sure what this is about, heat stress, maybe, although it hasn’t been that hot. And the seedlings weren’t old, oversized, or root-bound when transplanted—no great STRESS all around (unusually stressful situations seem to make plants, like people, do odd things). As far as I can tell, conditions this year, from seed starting on, haven’t been overall different from in the past, so why all this early, TINY, flowering and fruiting? I’ve seen this when plants were left too long in small pots and…miniaturized, but that wasn’t the case for these guys. It doesn’t worry me so far, but I’ll check into it. Meanwhile, off they come, and then, well, as usual, we’ll see what happens next!
Fieldwork!
Towards the end of the day, Conall waters in newly transplanted eggplant and peppers. Over the last week, focus has moved almost entirely to the open field. The seedling room is empty, the last of the seedlings are now in the greenhouse, and the push is on to get things in the ground as quickly as we can. My juggling of HELP is on-going. Word-of-mouth recruiting has gone surprisingly well, there’s quite a list of willing workers, and it’s tempting to call in a whole crew to transplant all at once. On the practical side, having to explain and coordinate takes a lot of time, I don’t yet have a System that works for several people in the garden at once, so I’m going along more carefully, working with Conall and at most one or two others per day. And one can’t forget the budget. In any case, everything should be in over the next 10 days. Think fast, take it slow!
More seedlings to the greenhouse
The spring seedling starting days are rapidly winding up. Moved about half of the remaining trays from the Milkhouse to the greenhouse, including most of the experimentally late-started tomatoes. Based on the marginally useful long-range weather forecast, I’m aiming to begin the main field transplants around the end of this week…
Getting busy
Hot peppers, and tomatoes behind. They’re some of the last set of seedlings, a bit of an experiment to see how late I can start ’em without slowing down later growth in the field. Outdoors, it’s been warm, gray and drizzling for two days now, things are starting to emerge, crops and weeds both, and it’s already time for a second planting of spinach and mesclun. Inside, the last several hundred seedlings are ready to be potted up and moved out to the greenhouse. We’re right at the point when things suddenly start to get intensely busy!