We knew fall was coming with our summer crops slowly starting to fade, but we didn't quite know it was coming this fast! Seems like we've skipped September and went straight to October. Below 40 tonight...really? Sure proves that the only thing predictable about farming is unpredictability.
Most years we still can count on August-like weather through mid-September; looks like that's not the case this year. It sure makes it more pleasant to work out there, but it makes our harvest planning a bit more difficult, combining shorter days with 40 degree nights is a bit of a challenge to estimate around. While the days are getting shorter, there's still plenty of daylight to keep things growing steadily, but the impact of colder temperatures isn't quite so predictable. Some crops it helps with; it keeps broccoli going from perfect to too far gone practically overnight, but it also makes it hard to determine how many cherry tomatoes are going to ripen compared to the previous week.
We managed to get all of the potatoes dug by mid week (and a cover crop seeded by the end of the week!) and all 68 boxes are now hanging out in our old walk in cooler up at the old farm in the dark at a perfect 47 degrees. We typically can carry potatoes in February or later with little issue and that's at temperatures lower than their ideal, so we've got high hopes or carrying all three tons of them to the finish line.
Our employees don't know it yet, but now that potatoes are done, onions are going to be this week's big project. It looks like our builder isn't quite going to get the barn finished before the onions need to be harvested, so we managed to get all the garlic out of the barn at the other property and into boxes (they're shacking up with the potatoes in the cooler). We were hoping to not have to haul onions up to there, but sometimes you just have to work with what you've got. It looks like we'll probably end up with somewhere around three tons of storage onions as well - a bit more than we can probably cure in just one barn. After years of battling to get a good onion crop, it's not a terrible problem to have, for sure!
We cleaned out our first hoophouse this week in preparation for fall/overwintered crops. It had its own little ecosystem going on in there, which sure made it interesting - first time we've experienced that before. There were snakes hanging from the cucumber vines eating frogs and hundreds of frogs hopping around everywhere eating all the bugs. Unfortunately, we evicted them all to make room for new crops, but they'll probably all be back shortly to continue the cycle, just with a kale and chard forest instead of a cucumber jungle. Needless to say, it was a bit of an adventure to get that done, but its nice to get one done. Only six more to go by the end of fall!
Well, time to make a plan for the week; pretty big harvest list this week!
-Brendan & Greta
