Our daily rhythms change with the seasons, and we're getting into the season of "big" harvests. All the crops that took a whole summer to grow are starting to be ready. Potatoes, winter squashes, and onions are all fighting for our time to get them from the fields into storage. For storage crops we always put aside enough for our winter vegetable boxes first, and then offer up the rest to our weekly bags (that's you), and then the farmers' markets if there's still enough to go around. Each year is different: things like rains, weeds, temperatures and sunshine tend to be the biggest variables affecting our harvests. Garlic was our best harvest in a few years and is all safe in storage now, sorted and sized with enough to supply our winter boxes well, and two more rounds for our weekly bags in October. Potatoes have been started and the dry weather in July/Aug seems to have brought down the yields, but having harvested only 3 of around 60 beds it's too early to tell for certain. Winter squashes are piling up on our greenhouse tables, it's time to cure and count them but it feels like we're comparable to last year. Onions however, we switched over to planting on mulch, and got a good hand weed in on almost all the beds... so we have a bumper crop of onions especially yellow ones. This week we're sending out some of the glorious large yellow onions our garden has given us, time for french onion soup and caramelized onion everything... yum!
Coming up in October is our watermelon radishes and sweet potatoes just as our tomatoes and summer crops like eggplants, peppers and zucchinis wind down. Around frosts we start on Brussels sprouts and kalettes, carrots and cabbages, and the root storage veggies. Shorter season crops, like lettuces, hakuri, kale and chard we typically have right up till frost. While the average frost date is October 8th, we plant lots of vegges that don't mind a gentle frost so we can have lots of fresh diversity sometimes till December!
We're in the final stages of launching our winter veggie box registration, and you'll be the first to know with an e-mail all about it as soon as registration is open. It will be very similar to last year and we've planned for some room to grow so you're all most welcome to join us!
