Not gonna lie...this was a bit of a rough week. BUT, we're past the hump, it's Harvest Festival tomorrow, and the weekend ahead is looking fine, so all's well! We both used to work for the Forest Service, and they used an analogy to do with wildfires or accidents or really anything going wrong -- the Swiss cheese model. Yes, that does sound strange, but it's describing the unlikely scenario where all of the holes in a bunch of Swiss cheese slices line up and something can get missed or overlooked that causes a big effect because of the 'holes lining up'. Anyway, this week being rough has brought that to mind because a number of factors added up to make it that way.
One, we're creeping towards the end of the season, and are just plain getting tired! It's a lot of physical labor to grow food (who knew!) and since we still consider ourselves 'kinda' new at this, we're working extra hard and long hours to try to make up for our learning curve.
Two, when you're nearing the end of the summer season in our zone AND you're hoping to use season extension to push some crops into the fall/winter, the To Do list is actually growing right now, not shrinking. We're feeling a bit behind because this time of year is a bit like a 'mini-Spring' in terms of planting. It's the time when we need to direct seed, plant and transplant for many weeks of harvesting all at once because with the diminishing daylight there's no longer time to space out plantings or else they won't reach maturity in time. So instead, we try to do one or two more massive plantings that will carry us through to the true end of the farming season in November. In other words, during the summer we plant enough salad each week for one week's harvest a month down the road. But now, we plant enough salad for 4 weeks of harvesting each week. By the time that salad reaches harvest age, it's growth will have slowed so much that it can just sit for a while and wait for it's turn to be cut.
Three, did you notice the temperature on Monday night!? We spent a lot of extra effort prepping for the cold snap. We came out pretty much unscathed at our Home Plot, but the Bend Plot reached 27 degrees and we definitely have some damage there. For the most part though, our efforts made a difference and we were lucky that it didn't get any colder for any longer! The damage is mostly to our squash blocks. Amazingly, summer squash can pretty much look dead and still keep on trucking, so though our production will be lessened, we should still have some to harvest. The winter squash we're not so sure on, there are a lot more squash out there still to ripen so time will tell how much this frost has affected that. Our preparations were mostly covering some crops with row cover, making sure the heater was working in the tomato house, and some VERY early morning irrigation intervention by Rudy!
Four, it's just been a big week in general because we're trying to be a little bit more prepared for the Kootenai Harvest Festival tomorrow.
Anyway, there are our Swiss cheese holes that added up to a tiring week overall. BUT, we've got some bounce back in our step now that most of the harvesting is done and we're looking forward to seeing all of your smiling faces as you come to pick up your produce boxes!
Cheers, Rudy & Bonnie
PS. The pic above is of sweet lunchbox peppers that we only JUST started harvesting. Hopefully we'll be able to get them into your shares for the last few weeks of the season. These babies are delicious and sweet, but they sure took their time getting to that point! The name lunchbox refers to the fact that you just eat these are a snack as there aren't really any seeds in them and what seeds they do have are located right up by the stem.
