Farm Happenings
We are far enough through this season that we can do some honest reflection on the current season as a whole. The first full week of October is our traditional time to intentionally turn our attention toward next season and dig into major course corrections we have to make.
This season has been a challenging one, a sentiment shared by most of our grower friends in the region. As part of the CSA, we hope to communicate the internal workings of the farm, but not to overwhelm you with the nitty-gritty. However, a few times a year we hope to give you a “State of the Farm” type update where we dig deeper into the farm as a whole. This is one of those weeks that Tom wrote out some of his perspective from the field.
This week on the farm… more rain, fog and clouds means more disease and rot on our produce. Since the start, this season has been a tough one, but we’ve been doing our best to grow quality vegetables for you. Some of our standard fall crops like turnips and radishes have been rotting in the field before they get big enough to pick. We were able to get some watermelon radishes last week from our “secret field” planting at the back of the farm, but our main crop doesn’t look good. Cauliflower and broccoli have been having trouble growing to size, mostly because they turn black with rot before it’s their time to be picked. In order to get some broccoli or cauliflower in the shares, we’ve been picking small, but that doesn’t always work out either because their shelf life is very limited.
In the spring we planted extra sweet potatoes, mainly all-purple ones, in the hopes of being able to wholesale a bit more and put a bit more in the share. Well, digging them last week was tough on the morale. More than half were rotted, there was either a squishy mass of stinky sweet potato, or nothing at all.
Most of our lettuce heads have been small this year too, and that is because we’ve been picking them early in order to get any lettuce at all. With so much rain, the base of the plant rots and eventually kills the lettuce. Wet weather spreads disease more easily than dry weather, and our main tools of soil health and crop rotation become ineffective when the weather is so wet and cloudy so consistently. But it does make us reconsider some of our practices in order figure out how we are inadvertently spreading diseases around the fields and how we can further improve our soil health and crop rotations for future tough seasons.
In the midst of all this fog, there have been bright moments. Our butternut and delicata squash yields were good, considering the plants almost died at planting and then did die early due to powdery mildew. All things considered, the tomatoes yielded well, as have the peppers. Our potatoes did extremely well, due to being planted extra early and on good ground, we had a great harvest this year. Onions and garlic had good yields as well. We made some changes last fall to our garlic planting which really helped. Instead of using rye mulch we used leaf mulch. This saved on labor and produced a great crop of garlic. We planted our onions a little differently too so we could make use of our transplanting machine. We may make further changes for next year to make them less labor intensive.
Speaking of labor, we’re at a bare bones crew right now. Brittany and Emily have been bringing in the harvest mostly by themselves for the past few weeks, while Tom has been trying to keep up with the farm’s field work and plantings between the rains. It has been increasingly difficult to find people to help us do this work. Knowing how to use one’s body to do vegetable work effectively is a learned skill, one that takes time, patience, and grit to develop. We have a small minority that can stick it out past a few months before they move on to easier work. Dealing with our labor situation is an area of major change that are looking to address for next year.
CSA Harvest
Lettuce
Greens Mix
Cilantro
Cabbage
Celeriac
Scallions
Garlic
Potatoes
Butternut Squash
Radishes
Sweet Peppers
Turnips
U-pick
Green Tomatoes (large and cherry) – last call!!
Beans
Herbs – Thyme, Sage, Oregano, Parsley, Lemon Verbena, Sorrel, Chives, Marjoram
Flowers – almost done!
Hot Peppers
Okra
