D&V Organics CSA Week 11
Our fields go through a transition as we make our way through July and into August. The middle of the summer is when we start implementing our plan for the big Fall and early Winter harvest seasons. We have a lot of work to do in the next couple weeks with cleaning up several acres of this Spring's old crop residue, drip tape and plastic mulch, and preparing those fields for some soil building and erosion fighting cover crops that will grow over the Fall and Winter months and serve us well next season. This week we accomplished our second of several rounds of Fall seedings in one of our greenhouses. This week we planted broccoli, sprouting broccoli, several types of radicchio, cauliflower, sprouting cauliflower, several types of lettuce, escarole, frisée, swiss chard, choy sum and parsley. In the coming weeks we'll be making seedings like this a regular thing, and will be including more diversity for the Fall crop lineup. As we move through the seasons we are always looking ahead, oftentimes months in advance, to make the most out of the slight changes in temperature each month brings. Another big task the crew accomplished this week was bringing in our onion crop for curing in the greenhouse. The onions began as seedlings back in February, were planted in the field in March and just harvested in total this week. With the dry weather we've had over the past couple months, we've been able to grow a really nice, diverse line of specialty onions. Most of the field was harvested and laid out to field cure, where the outer skin and green tops start to dry down and harden, enabling the onions to keep for several months. Since our South Jersey climate is humid and moist over the night, we bring our onions into the greenhouse and finish the drying/curing process where it's consistently hot and free from over night dew. Soon we'll have a few thousand pounds of fully cured onions to add to our offerings.
Enjoy,
Derek & Vicky
