Well, if we had any doubts about it being fall, they left with the frost that showed up by Saturday morning. We did cover some of the peppers and all of the outside lettuce just in case the forecast was wrong. We dealt with that all spring whenever we had a clear, cold night forecast - the forecast was always warmer than it ended up being by a solid 5 degrees, which makes a big difference when its 27 instead of 32. Other than the one row of pepper plants we didn't cover, everything else did just fine - this time of year most of the plants we're still growing can handle down to 27-28 with little issue and believe it or not, some of them actually improve with a little frost.
Things are really starting to wind down around here now - we cleaned up the cherry tomato hoophouses and did our one last final planting of lettuce in a tunnel last week. This week the big task is to tackle the slicing tomatoes in our largest hoophouse. That is the last really big task around here for the season that we all want to get behind us, so it looks like a good time to get it over with. It's always nice to go from the tomato jungle in the morning to a completely clean hoophouse by the end of the day. We'd normally replant for fall, but we have some pretty big holes in the outer layer of plastic - usually we use a special tape to patch it, but these are way too high to get to. So, once it's cleaned out, we're going to tackle installing new plastic so we can get it properly inflated before the winds show up in full force for winter.
For those of you not counting - there are only two more weeks of the main season farm shares counting this upcoming delivery. It sure went by fast for us this year; probably because we had a busy year with moving the farm. It's always a bit of a relief to get to this part of the season where things are wrapping up. When things start going wrong early in the season (as they inevitably do), it definitely adds to the stress level as you can just start subtracting dollars with every thing that goes wrong. So when we manage to get to this time of year and we can just start rationing what we have left in the fields and storage, it sure cuts down the stress level. It's always tough to trust the plan that we put in place months before over the winter, especially when things go wrong, but as it turns out, we usually plan for things to go wrong, so it tends to work out just fine!
Time to go enjoy this sunny fall day!
-Brendan & Greta
