Lettce Rejoice!
July 21, 2022
The Great Garlic Harvest
Administrative Details:
Just a quick thanks to those that came out for the farm tour last weekend. It was such a great event and I was thrilled to see so many smiling faces?
We ended up having to substitute green zucchini for a number of people this last week. We had some cool days, and are in a stretch of nearly six-weeks without significant rainfall. While we can irrigate, and we do, the plants know the difference and it’s hard to predict how much harvest we’ll end up with in any one week. Those with substitutions either received yellow zucchini, patty pans, or broccolini. It’s all good stuff, right?
What’s in the box?:
New crops always come in at a trickle. There are a few cherry tomatoes, eggplants, and the like on offer, but the key word here is FEW. Not to worry, we will all have tomatoes a-plenty in a few short weeks.
The cucumbers are the real stars on the farm right now. We harvest them every day and often get close to 100 of these crunchy treats.
I have a real love of tzatziki and suggest you give it a try. I’ll also note that draining the shredded cucumbers is important, and should not be skipped:
https://www.loveandlemons.com/tzatziki-sauce/
On the Farm:
We harvested half of the garlic on Monday and plan to get the rest out next Monday. It’s a big job that goes like this:
1. We undercut the beds with a tractor mounted undercutting bar. Two of us ride on top of the bar and pull bulbs to make sure it’s at the right depth and not in fact chopping everything in half (it’s happened).
2. We then pull the rest of the bulbs, gently brush off the soil and leave them to dry for two hours in the sun.
3. We snip the roots to ¼”, and the stalks to 2” and place the bulbs in crates filling them only half way.
4. We take the half-full crates to a walk-in cooler and stack them on top of empty crates. We place fans at the base and run a dehydrator for 2 weeks or so until everything is dried down and the paper skin is crisp and easy to clean.
5. We eat amazing garlic all year long!
When we were finished we prepped the now empty garlic beds with compost and watered them to pre-sprout weed seeds. Next week we’ll harrow them and plant half of our fall carrots (then we’ll repeat the whole process the following week). Carrots don’t compete well with weeds, and are finicky to hoe so we try really hard to get things under control before they go in.
Dan, who works the Bayfield Market for us with his lovely wife Sandy, is building me a 25-gallon compost tea brewer. I caught the compost tea bug this spring when applying it to some very sickly tomatoes helped them to turn around and flourish. Now I want to put it on just about everything. Here’s a video of the design we followed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCK_pjcQOTo
That’s all for now folks, happy eating until next time!
Farmer Tamara
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