It's hard to believe it'll be September in a couple short days! While we enjoy summer, fall is our favorite time around the farm, so we're ready for it. Nobody around here will be complaining about cooler days, that's for sure!
We've got a few more weeks of planting before we're done for the season. This time of year, we need to be real diligent about planting crops on time. In the spring, as the days get longer and weather gets nicer, crops planted one week apart are ready a bit less than a week apart. Through summer, they're ready just about a week apart, but as fall approaches, they're ready around a week and a half apart, as the days shorten and the weather cools, so we need to make sure we stay on a good schedule to keep crops going strong. We've been battling poor germination on our early fall spinach plantings (we usually never try to seed this early, as warm weather makes spinach seed go dormant), but we've gotten great germination on radishes, arugula, etc. I guess we'll just keep trying on the spinach until we get better results; this week's weather looks a bit more promising.
We always feel like fall is a bit slower, and I guess in some respects, it is. Reality is though, in less than two months, the last of our outdoor production will wrap up. In the meantime we need to clean up old rows, seed cover crops and get everything set up for spring. Right now, we're getting ready to start ripping out cucumbers and flowers from the hoophouses to make room for our fall plantings. The goal of fall crops is to get them to full maturity just in time 10 hour days - the point at which crops don't grow anymore. After that point, the hoophouses simply act as a refrigerator, holding crops until we're ready to harvest them. It's always a challenge to time crops so one is ready to leave when the next is ready to go in; late harvests or extra vigorous transplants ready to be planted can throw the whole plan off. Luckily, this year it looks like we're in good shape with some kale, chard and scallion transplants headed to the tunnels, along with some seeded spinach and eventually, radishes.
On a totally different note, we're pretty excited that our builder is supposed to return to start building our storage barn this week - the final step in our construction project for the year. Hopefully he gets it done quickly, as it'll serve as a perfect home for curing our storage onions. By our quick math, we have somewhere around two to three tons of storage onions - that's a lot more than we've ever had and with garlic curing in the barn on the other property and red onions in the greenhouse, we're just about out of space - especially for that many onions. It seems this year is the opposite of last year and the crops that were problematic last year (i.e. onions) are the best performers this year and vice versa - strange how things seem to work like that.
Hope everyone's enjoying their farm shares now that we're just passing through "peak" season; no worries though, still lots more variety to look forward to!
-Brendan & Greta
