Just a reminder that the garlic planting party is on for Saturday October 8th from 1:00 until done. Put it on your calendar before something else fills in the currently empty space. Space is limited to only the number of people who can fit on a 20 acre parcel so now is the time to commit!
We have five weeks left counting this week if we make it to our goal. Sometimes we run out of produce before the end of the season so don’t put it in your calendar using permanent marker bits.
This Week’s Top Story
One thing I’ve learned about vegetable farming over the years is that it is really just all about water. Vegetables are just water containers with a small amount of solid material. For example, cucumbers are about 96% water. Tomatoes are 94% water. And the aptly named watermelon is 92% water. Even some of the less water laden veggies are still mostly water. Winter squash is 81% water. Potatoes are 79% water. That’s a lot of water we are growing!
I am reminded of this water issue at this time of year because it seems lately we are moving vast amounts of water around in these oddly shaped containers. In the early parts of the season the water vessels tend to be low density containers — things like lettuce. Now we are harvesting the high density water receptacles like winter squash and potatoes. And with the squash we are having a banner year! Unlike last season when we had a horrible winter squash season (due surprisingly by having too much water in the form of rain) this season we are having a phenomenal season where we don’t have enough room in our greenhouse to store and cure all that water, er, winter squash. Plus with the lack of labor the mass per unit worker is even higher than normal!
So now most of us farm laborers are much shorter than when we started the season and have much longer arms. Though we try not to overfill the harvest crates, sometimes you just get carried away and pile 70 pounds of squash in a bin. That’s the equivalent of carrying 8.5 gallons of water! In the words of a ’70s stoner, “That’s heavy sh*t man.”
In addition to having more squash, some of the squash — in particular the spaghetti squash — are unusually large. I’m not sure we’d be able to fit anything else in the delivery totes if we placed a spaghetti squash in the box. The acorns seem to be on the smaller side though. I have no idea why the difference.
In addition, we typically plant red kuri and buttercup squash as a “trap crop” for cucumber beetles. We did the same this year but the number of cucumber beetles is far below what we typically experience. The result is that some of these plants survived and produced a few squash. How fun is that? For those wondering what a trap crop is, its a crop planted to attract the pests away from the main crop. Cucumber beetles love buttercup and kuri squash so they will go after them first. Then once they’ve killed these off they will go after the other squash plants. The hope is that this delay will allow the other plants to grow big enough to survive a sustained attack by the cucumber beetles. It usually works fairly well though last season the number of beetles was extraordinary. We’ve used Hubbard squash as a trap crop in the past but found if we had low beetle pressure and the Hubbards produced fruits the fruits we bigger than most people cared for so we switched to squash varieties that were better suited for families and not platoons.
What will we have this week?
Winter squash and pie pumpkins! Still more beans, shallots, garlic, tomatillos, tomatoes (mostly green that we picked prior to this evening’s forecasted frost), a few zucchinis, peppers, some eggplants, and probably some other things I forget.
It is also a Flower week!
Brain Teaser of the week!
Since we are talking about water content I thought this would be a good brain teaser though I have used it before so for those of us with bad long term memory this could be a new challenge!
Say you have a 10 lb watermelon that is 90% water. You want to dehydrate it down so that it is now 50% water. How much would the dehydrated watermelon now weigh?
As always, do not hesitate to send in questions, comments, suggestions or the answer to this week’s brain teaser!