Winter Squash season is here! We've been harvesting for the last couple weeks and are anticipating continuing to harvest for 2 more weeks. Then the crop will be dried/cured in our greenhouse to ensure long term storage. This season we are growing 7 different varieties! In the picture above the varieties are (clockwise starting at noon position) Sunshine Kabocha, Buttercup Burgess,, Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkin and Delicata! Not pictured are Spaghetti and Butternut as we are starting to harvest them tomorrow!
All this rain has really put a damper (pun intended) on getting things done! We were getting frustrated last week not being able to get the weekly scheduled direct seedings done out in the field. But, we just have to keep remembering that it's better we didn't get them because it would have been much more frustrating seeing all our hard work getting washed away!!! With all the rains predicted for this week we are going to do a lot more seeding in the greenhouse of things we normally would have just direct seeded in the field. It is more costly and labor intensive for us to do this, but for some crops (like spinach) seems to be the only option if we are going to harvest any this Fall.
Last Thursday was a very busy day at the Farm. We started the day off getting our new walk-in cooler delivered. We are really excited for it's arrival as this now means we have two coolers we can set at different temperatures to be able to keep different crops at their ideal temperatures. Then, we got a visit from the Chef (Sean Wilson) of Proof to go over the Root Down dinner Proof is putting on featuring all produce from our Farm! The dinner is this Saturday night and tickets are still available on the Proof website. After that we started getting ready for the Farm Stand we host every Thursday from 3:30pm till 7:00pm. While Kate and Tom ran the Farm Stand I (Farmer Ben) had to leave the Farm at 4pm to talk about Organic Farming at the Des Moines' Botanical Center's Social Irrigation series. Believe it or not, between all these other activities we actually still got some farm work done!!!
