Welcome to fall! There's no doubt now that summer is quickly waning. Cool nights give way to misty, foggy mornings thick with dew. We start our mornings in rubber boots and layers, but by lunchtime things have dried off and we are shedding layers, abandoning the boots for some footwear that is more comfortable.
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In celebration of the taste of summer, we're offering a few deals this week. Basil micros will be on SALE - perfect for making up a fresh tomato and basil salad with Fred's Fancy and a little olive oil, salt and black pepper. We'll also be offering a fresh salsa pack, which includes 2# of tomatoes, a clamshell of cilantro microgreens, a large red onion, and a head of garlic - all grown right here at Great Oak Farm. Just because it's starting to get cool out doesn't mean we're ready for the tastes of summer to leave us so soon! Plus, nachos in the oven with fresh salsa is some serious comfort food on a cool evening.
This is the last week that we are historically frost free. After Sept 15, anything goes up here. We'll have gorgeous, warm spells like this weekend, and then without warning the weather will turn on a dime. Last year, we skipped out on having any fall frosts and went right into a fall freeze, so who knows what this fall will bring. The good news is that crops are coming along nicely, and we're moving into position to begin the big fall storage harvests.
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The first big harvest will be the onions. We've already begun pulling them and laying them out in the beds to dry down a little more outside before we come back and collect them to finish curing down in the greenhouse. We'll have 2# bags of onions available each week from here on out this fall, and each bag will include one red onion (as long as we have them available) and several yellow onions. The onions are drying out nicely, so storing on the counter in a brown bag should be fine - but they are not completely cured down yet. If your house is particularly humid or you are concerned about them getting moldy on the counter, you can store them in the fridge like you would a fresh onion in a plastic bag or glass storage container.
I once heard another farm describe onions as "the double black diamond of vegetables," and I think that's a well deserved title. The onion plants are pretty defenseless against weed pressure - thin, small leaves don't shade out any weeds at all, and their tiny root systems can't go far to access moisture or nutrients that nearby weeds gobble up at a much faster pace.
This year, our onion size is fine. Baseball sized onions are great and all, but we want softball sized onions, darn it! To that end, we'll be re-evaluating our onion processes to see how we can improve them and get consistently larger onions. We did get some big onions this year in low spots in the beds where moisture was more concentrated (especially the red onions), but we want to see those results throughout the bed! Having an irrigation system next summer will have a big impact on onion size, but we're working on figuring out better bed layouts for easier mechanical cultivation as well.
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The next big harvest this month will be the winter squash. Farmer Ryan and I poked around in the squash field yesterday, and they are coming along nicely. Vines are beginning to die back, so we're looking at about 2 weeks until harvest. We grabbed a few delicata squash to taste test, and they were nearly ready! The squash roasted up nicely with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper (and it even passed the "kid test" at dinner last night!) but could use another week or so to get a little sweeter.
This season, we grew some spaghetti squash for the first time in years, and those babies are looking fantastic. If spaghetti squash is your thing, you are in luck, my friend. We've got loads of butternuts, red kuri, buttercup, and some beautiful multicolored acorn squash as well. I love the cozy, fall feeling of roasting squash in the oven almost as much as I enjoy eating the finished product.
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In the hoophouses, the peppers, and cherry and slicer tomatoes are still going strong. Barring any extremely cold temps or disease outbreaks, we hope to have those available for at least the rest of the month. Where the cucumbers were growing, we've removed all the vines and seeded those beds down to fall spinach.
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Germinating spinach can be tricky this time of year. Temps much over 75 will decrease seed germination in spinach, so we're trying multiple different treatments to help keep the soil cool during the day. You can see how we are using the black shade cloth as well as white row cover to reflect the daytime sun and keep the soil a little cooler and moister. After the temps begin to drop around dinner time, I head back up there and remove that row cover so things can cool down during the night.
Earlier this week during the middle of a sunny day, we took the laser thermometer into the hoophouse and checked to see how warm the soil was. The open soil with no treatment had a temp of 104 (!), the soil under the shade cloth was 86, and the soil under both shade cloth AND white row cover was 74. What a difference! We're also keeping things cooler on sunny days by overhead irrigating after lunchtime for some evaporative cooling. In the past, we've always just seeded spinach and kept the hoophouse ends open all day and night to drop soil temps, but this year we're excited to see how a little more management in keeping soil cooler can improve our fall spinach crop.
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The sweet corn continues to be abundant, and we're impressed with how nicely the clover cover crop we seeded earlier has established in the beds. This time of year, the deer begin to creep into our beds of sweet corn (and other crops as well) more heavily than they did during the summer. They know winter is on the way, and I think they are just as eager to stock up on nutritious produce as we are.
Our final seeding of green beans has been browsed especially heavily by the deer, so this week might be the last week of 2021 for fresh green beans. We'll be out there soon to harvest everything we can before the deer and the cold beat us to it, but fair warning - enjoy those beans while you can. Other crops like cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, and carrots are (for now) being left alone by the deer. These crops handle the cold just fine, even improving in flavor when temps get cooler.
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Finally, as the cooler temps stick around, we farmers enjoy working in the microgreen room more and more. Being warm and dry while you work is definitely underrated!
Until next week, take good care, and thanks so very much for making us YOUR farmers!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
