September Crop Report

Keep bringing in the pint size clam shells! So far with the great participation level we haven’t had to acquire another case of clam shells. Helps the environment!

Could still use help processing garlic and also onions! Let me know if you find some free time on your hands (hard to come by these days).

What will we have this week?

Potatoes! This week will be dark red norlands. We have a opportunity to send these out without washing them! How great is that? Typically when we harvest potatoes the soil sticks to the spuds and we have to wash them to keep as much of the farm here at the farm. This year since it was so dry prior to our harvesting them very little dirt stuck to the taters. We could still wash them but we’ve found over the years that washed potatoes do not store well. Plus since we put the taters in bags for delivery, putting wet potatoes in bags exacerbates this rot problem. So we are taking advantage of the lack of rain and sending you dusty potatoes. Just wash them prior to using them, which I suspect you already do.

Anything else? Sure, we’ll also have tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, tomatillos, cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, okra, beans, onions, garlic, cabbage, peppers, hot peppers, watermelons, a few honeydews, edamame, parsley and all the other things that aren’t coming to mind.

We also have Fruit, Eggs, ‘Shrooms and Flowers this week. Fruit the week is First Kiss apples, kiwi, plums and grapes. Mushrooms are log grown shiitake.

A Quick Note About Watermelons

We noticed a few watermelons turning from melon into water here in our storage area. This isn’t unexpected (why didn’t I just say it was expected?). Watermelons are living entities and sometimes get sick. In this case the sickness turned it into a bag of water with little solid substance left. I suspect it is the same Geotrichum Candidum that has affected some tomatoes. Anyway, I’ve heard from a couple of others that they had a problem with the watermelon they took home. Hopefully this isn’t widespread. Detecting which watermelons will have this problem is problematic. What appears to be a perfectly good watermelon one day turns into a watermelon bomb the next. I’ve even seen where what I thought was a perfectly good watermelon when I put it in the pick-up tent become a water bomb within an hour. It seems to change that fast (or more likely it is changing on the inside but the rind isn’t compromised yet). I haven’t seen it in the cantaloupes or honeydews but that may be due to their being stored in the walk-in cooler. And I don’t recall seeing it in the sugar baby watermelons (dark green with red flesh). Seems the yellow dolls are the most susceptible. I just wanted people to be aware of the situation so if you are about to cut open your watermelon perhaps do so over a sink. If it turns out it is liquid please accept our apology and feel free to grab a replacement this week. We can send out replacements to the delivery folks but I suspect that by the time you read this and get back to me that we will have already delivered many of the boxes and by next week we will most likely be out of melons. Sorry to anyone who experienced this issue. Hopefully the good ones compensated for any bad ones you’ve had.

Farm News

Since we are just over halfway through the season, I think it is about time we look at all the crops to give you an idea of where they stand — a crop report you might say. In no particular order: (actually for my benefit I’m going from west to east for the most part)

Garlic is harvested, stored in the greenhouse with about 30% processed. Hopefully we can get to the rest of it this week.

Leeks are looking reasonably good. We’ll harvest them in late September or October.

Shallots and onions have all been harvested and are curing in the greenhouse. We’ll process them as soon as we finish processing the garlic.

The herbs are doing quite well and we will continue to give them out as we find time to harvest them.

We have harvested about a third of the potatoes. We have about 1,000 pounds in storage to be given out over the next few weeks. Since all the plants are dead, we’ll harvest the rest as the season progresses or we find extra time.

Brussels sprouts are not doing great. We had an influx of rabbits eat a whole bunch of the plants when they were small. We’ll have to wait to see how much we actually get. Might be a bad BS year.

Kale is looking reasonably good even though the rabbits ate some of these as well. We haven’t been harvesting and giving it out because we had so much else to harvest and give out. We’ll get back to the kale sometime in September.

Cabbage is the same as kale. Its looking pretty good despite the hot weather. We’ll start harvesting and giving it out this week.

The Napa cabbage for the fall is looking good though it is much smaller than I anticipated. Napa is another one of those crops where we had a great variety that worked quite well here but they discontinued the seeds (at least for this season). So we tried another variety and though it is doing ok for the fall (it didn’t perform well for Spring planted Napa cabbage) it is quite tiny. Like six to ten inches tall. I guess they call it Minuet for a reason. At least it will fit into our delivery totes!

Fall cauliflower is looking better than our Spring cauliflower, but that doesn’t really say much. Hopefully it works out.

Fall carrots are looking good. Just need them to grow bigger.

The Daikon radishes as doing good enough. We don’t need tons of them so I think we’ll have enough to satisfy demand. They were attacked by flea beetle when they first emerged.

We tried direct seeding beets for the fall. They keep coming up but then disappear. I’m not sure what is eating them. No foot prints. Disappointing. But maybe we’ll get some.

The popcorn looks good! We’ll wait until the stalks dry then harvest and give it out.

Our edamame is doing better than the last many years. We initially had deer eating the plants but we’ve reduced the deer pressure so the plants had a chance to grow this year. We started harvesting it this week.

The sweet corn is done for the season. I hope you enjoyed it.

We planted two rounds of lettuce mix for the fall. The first round germinated well and now just has to grow to harvest size. The second was put in on Friday and is already germinating.

We have beans galore! Our second planting of beans is already onto the second harvest of one bed and half way through the first harvest on the other — and then we still have the third planting of beans. It is amazing how many beans one can get out of a bed when the deer don’t eat the plants. Get you bean recipes ready!

When we tilled under the peas earlier this summer we did it a bit late so the left-behind peas had a chance to mature and now have reseeded. I’m not sure what variety we have growing or if they will make it to peas size but I am hopeful. Unfortunately they are in an areas that we don’t have irrigation so we need rain to help us in this accidental project.

We direct seeded arugula, bok choy and broccoli raab two weeks ago. They are starting to come up. The flea beetles typically are gone by this time but not this year. So they are snacking on all these crops. No idea how well they will do yet.

The hoop house tomatoes are still coming along. This season it seems like we are just barely getting enough tomatoes to give out each week instead of the usual overwhelming amount of tomatoes coming all at once like we’ve seen in the past. I think this is good, unless you like a lot of tomatoes all at once. And with the cooler weather (but not for long I hear) we’ve seen less incidence of yellow shoulder.

The cherry tomatoes keep producing but we are definitely past peak. I expect them to slowly die down their production.

The tomatillos seem to be acting like the tomatoes — not too many, not too few. They continue to produce but I suspect they will decrease their production over the next several weeks.

The zucchini are surprisingly still producing. We get about 200 per week. Not sure if this will continue but it is probably the latest we’ve ever seen this level of productivity from zucchini.

The cucumbers are definitely winding down. I hope everyone has had enough cukes. This may be the last week.

The okra just won’t quit. Looking at it this weekend I was shocked by the number of flowers. And each of those flowers turns into an okra pod. I don’t know if we’ve hit peak okra yet. Hopefully you have learned how to enjoy okra.

The eggplants are both winding down and winding up. They’ve been winding down for quite a while but I’m starting to see new flowers emerging. So, if we get a warm fall we could see another flush of eggplants.

The sweet peppers are ramping up, though I suspect it will be more of a plateau than an overwhelming abundance. We’ll most likely see peppers until the frost kills them.

The flowers are definitely slowing down. That is to be expected this time of year. We’ll keep trying to make bouquets until there are no flowers left.

The melons are practically done. We went through the patch one last time and got whatever was left. Most of the plants have died so I don’t expect them to produce more.

The winter squash and pie pumpkins look incredibly abundant. Once we get the garlic and onions out of the greenhouse and into storage we can harvest the winter squash and pie pumpkins. I’m hoping we can find the time before the weather turns cold and wet.

The gourds look equally abundant. Could be a lot of gourds for FlowerShare.

The sweet potato vines look healthy and vigorous. Typically that bodes well for good sweet potato production but we can’t be sure until we actually dig them. The longer it stays warm the better outlook we have for the sweet potatoes. I’m hopeful and have my fingers crossed.

The watermelons are in their last week. They had a good run.

The hot peppers are abundant and ready to pick. We just need to find time to get them, though we can harvest them as needed — until frost. Then we harvest them all if the forecast calls for freezing weather

The lemongrass looks quite grassy. It is always a bit tricky to measure its success until we harvest it since it looks like grass and so does grass, so unless we look closely we can be fooled into thinking the grass weeds are lemongrass or visa versa. I think it will turn out fine.

And finally the decorative pumpkins for FlowerShare are ready whether you are ready for them or not. We’ll start harvesting them as soon as we find time, which might not be until October though I’d love to get them now while they are looking sooo good.

That pretty much covers everything. It surprises me how many different things we grow, and I’m living with them every day! it gives you an idea that there is a lot of stuff left for the rest of the season, which I think is eight more weeks.

Recipes of the Week

Since we are giving out potatoes and parsley I figured I’d include this recipe. It’s fast, easy and delicious!

Here is another easy recipe that uses two things from this week’s share — garlic and green beans. Fast, easy and delicious!

Joke of the Week

This joke came to us as we were harvesting the honeydews last week. We might have been in the field too long.

What do you call a sad dog who likes cantaloupe?

A Melon Collie.

As always, send in your questions, comments, suggestions, lame jokes or anything else you think would benefit the farm, the farm membership or society as a whole.