Well, it looks like we escaped any frost last night, so looks like we got a few more days to keep growing! Reality is this time of year frost doesn't really bother us much; other than peppers and flowers, both of which are wrapping up, most of what we have growing can handle some cold. In fact, we wait for frost for some crops like rutabagas and Brussels sprouts, as it tends to make them much better quality.
There isn't too much to talk about regarding the farm this time of year, it's the same story as the past few weeks - harvesting, cleaning up, etc. We're starting to spend some more time in the vineyard to get it in shape for next year. Next year will be our first large harvest that we'll be selling to area wineries. It won't be the full 20 tons we'll be producing in another couple years, but it'll still be a lot of grapes, so now's the time to get it ready to go! We harvested a few hundred pounds of Brianna grapes this morning that we'll be making into wine this afternoon and hope to harvest some from most of the remaining varieties in the next couple weeks (frost and bird permitting - real late ripening this year!) to get some more practice in with. Winemaking is a rather intriguing process that combines art and science and just like tomatoes, we only get one shot each year to try, so we don't plan on wasting any years of practice!
Sometime in the next few weeks we'll be sending out something to get some feedback from everyone on their Harvie experience. It's an expensive system for us to use, but we feel like it is a huge improvement from our previous offerings and we've had lots of positive comments on it. Of course, we're not the ultimate end user and we haven't heard from everyone, so we want to make sure it's working well all around. We have noticed a couple issues here and there throughout the season that it looks like the developer is working on fixing, so we're happy to see that.
Prior to this year, everyone received the same contents in their share and it's been interesting to watch the huge variance in box contents while we pack boxes each week. From that perspective it appears that Harvie is doing what it is supposed to. It's also helping us get a feel for what we need to grow more/less of, which will sure help our planning next year. We were kind of diving into an unknown this year with trying to determine how much of each crop to grow. Now, with a year behind us, we know what consistently has sold out that we need to add more of and what we had too much of so we can continue to dial in a bit more next year.
Well, it looks like we're off to crush some grapes before it gets too late!
-Brendan & Greta
