I'm super excited to be sending out cantaloups this week! For those of you with kids going back to school, it's a great taste of summer before they catch the bus again. Seasonality is such an interesting concept - we'll have lots of "summer" tastes available all the way into October. It's true that some crops always come ready to harvest at a certain time of year. Fruits are a good example. However, veggies have a little more wiggle room.
Seasonality at Fiddlehead is determined by lots of different factors. The "days to maturity" is the number of days it takes to grow from seed to harvest. Arugula is ready in a month, but some crops take more than three months like pumpkins and brussels sprouts. The harvest window can be a week, like cilantro which gets to size then goes to flower (so we can't pick it anymore). Tomatoes we can harvest continuously over up to three months! Pests and disease also inform when we're likely to plant certain crops (to avoid pressures) or when we have to give up on crops. Sometimes, the weather gets the better of us and gives us unexpected limits. Finally, we're big on season extension around here, and have a greenhouse to keep those tomatoes coming. While there's very little storage in the Summer, come fall we tuck lots of veggies away to keep safe for the colder months. So seasonality, in a nutshell... is just what happens to be available on a given day!
That's my fun fact for this week, Heather
