Fall is in the air...

So we are now well into September and it is time to clean up summer crops.  Due to our warm winter and early spring everything has been approximately three weeks ahead of schedule this year.  It feels great in the beginning when the tomatoes are here in mid June, but unfortunately they are finished early as well, and it is a little sad to lose them now.   I can’t really complain, the vines got to more than 13 feet long and we harvested over 375 quarts of cherry tomatoes, more than 500 pounds of heirlooms, and around 200 quarts of drying tomatoes.  The plants have done their job.  I’ll be pulling out the cherry tomatoes this week, and the heirlooms next week. 

Blue guarding the last tomatoes of the season

Turnips growing under the fleece

The eggplants are still holding on strong, and the peppers are loaded with fruit, though they are ripening slowly with the cool temperatures. Fall crops are coming along well, and the cool nights are starting to turn the carrots sweeter and sweeter, as they pull sugar from the leaves to prepare for winter. The turnip greens are tall, but the bulbous roots have not really started to fatten yet. They are covered with a light weight fleece, which keeps them a little warmer, and should push them along a little faster as well as keeping the bugs away. Over the next few weeks more crops will get light weight fleece, eventually graduating to heavy duty.  Fleece can give you up to a 12 degree gain, making a huge difference in growing time, and keeping the frost at bay. It also keeps in humidity, and creates a mini greenhouse. Last year I was able to harvest right up until Christmas, and probably could have gone longer. (It was time for vacation, and the beach was calling my name.) I also use fleece in the spring to start crops early.

Beans, beans and more beans

I started harvesting salsify and scorzonera this week which was exciting as they are both new crops for me and seem to have done well. The flageolet beans did fatten and I will be able to harvest them this week.  Also on the agenda this week; seeding radishes and Japanese turnips, planting pac choi and lettuce, and weeding, weeding, weeding. 

  On the harvest list -- the last of the cherry tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, eggplant, bell, shishito and peppadew peppers, lima, haricovert, and flageolet beans, carrots, beets, salsify, scorzonera and herbs. 

September 5

Finally, August is over - and like I’ve said before -- it's a tough month for me.  It is so tough in fact that I often find myself having dreamlike fantasies of freak frosts or storms wiping things out, sometimes, these musings go so far as to imagine myself in the driver’s seat of a giant lawnmower. Now, before you judge me please keep in mind that I love my job, but I was in the middle of my fourth month with no real days off, and the cracks were beginning to show. A few of my farmer friends and I have talked about this August phenomenon several times.  We’ve decided to call it the “August Wall”, after months of heat, moving irrigation, bug battles and early mornings which is tiring enough.  All of it is made even more difficult to bear by the fact that easier times are now right around the corner. Temperatures will drop, rainfall will increase, weeds will slow down, and the summer bugs will start moving off (well some are just setting up residence in the soil, leaf litter, or forest debris, but we’ll talk about that later). I decided last weekend I had to get outta dodge. A chef friend of mine was cooking for an Outstanding in the Fields dinner and had a spare ticket. Perfect timing!

Out Standing in the Field dinner table

O.F. is a great company - they put on these incredible dinners in the middle of farms all over the country, setting long tables for up to 200 people to sit and eat dinner together.  It is all served family style, cooked by local chefs, and grown/produced within approximately 50 miles of the location.  It is a celebration of farmers, chefs and food.  It was a great evening.

The first limas of the season

I came back refreshed and ready to get back into things.  Just two days away makes for huge differences, and a backlog on harvesting.  The lima beans had finally plumped up in earnest.  (What’s that saying, a watched pot doesn’t boil? Apparently that applies to lima beans as well.) The French beans decided to go bonkers, and I harvested over 10 lbs of them when I got back.  It now seem to be in the thick of bean season, good timing over all as the tomatoes are already starting to slack off. I planted all of the radicchio and the final planting of beets.  

The turnip greens are high and lush, the radishes have popped, and lettuce is finally back in the garden after its long summer hiatus. The weeds are taking over again, while I have been doing all this other stuff, but I will catch up on them this week. Also on the docket for this week; seeding spinach, french breakfast radishes, japanese turnips, and more pac choi, radicchio and lettuce, finally cleaning the shallots for storage, and prepping beds down in the garden. 

Newly planted baby lettuces and radicchio

I ordered a few species of parasitic nematodes to spray on the soil.  There are good and bad nematodes.  The baddies go after the roots of your plants, but the goodies attack larvae hiding out in your soil. They are microscopic worms, and there are over 20,000 different species. One handful of garden soil contains over a 1000 of these individuals. They also feed on bacteria and fungus, however their all of their roles in the soil are still not totally understood.  I purchased two species, because they work on different types of insects and live in different levels of the soil. Mostly I got them to go after my cucumber beetles that are hiding out already and waiting for spring, though there are smaller populations of problem pests that they will also help me out with, army worms, cut worms and various beetles, to name a few.  The nematodes establish in the soil, and some survive to repopulate in the spring. They are currently waiting in my fridge until we get a nice soaking rainfall, which we have unfortunately not had since they arrived.  Then I’ll spray them after dark, so that they have plenty of time to dig in before the sun dries them up.

On the harvest list we have bean mania -- French beans, two types of limas, lazy wife greasy beans and soy beans all coming in abundantly, and flageolet beans right around the corner. There are still bell, shishito, and peppadew peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, carrots, beets, and herbs. Last but not least we have our first okra of the season. 

Okra flowers and baby okra.  The flowers are delicious fried
just like squash blossoms.

 I want to apologize to anyone reading this that may have felt abandoned during last month, and I hope that I have made up for it with this extra long entry.

Oh, and in case anyone is worried, my morbid fantasies are happening much more infrequently these days. Yeah September!

Zinnias grown for designer Gregory Britt and the floral department at The Inn.