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.  

August 21

So long has passed since I last wrote, and it has been a busy time, still is in fact, so I will have to make this short. 

 

Fall planting has truly begun, the brussel sprouts and first generation of cauliflower and romanesco have been in for a while now, and the second generation went in about 10 days ago.  The greenhouse is full of other fall transplants including radicchio, lettuce, watermelon radish, pac choi and sprouting broccoli, all going in next week.  The last seedings for carrots, beets and haricovert beans were last week. 

 

Blue making himself comfortable under the basil bush

 

The first planting of soy beans

There is also a lot of harvesting going on.  Currently we are picking tomatoes (which includes a lot of varieties), peppers, eggplant, haricot vert beans, soy beans, lima beans, greasy beans, carrots, beets, watermelon, and cucumbers.  This week we are prepping all the beds for next weeks plantings, removing some old plantings, and of course the weeding and bug battles continue.

 

Sweet habeneros

 

August is always the hardest month for me, summer harvest and fall planting combined makes for a crazy time.  Fall is right around the corner.  This week we've been having unseasonably cool weather and I hope that doesn’t mean we are in for an early frost.

 

Have a good week. 

The honey bees refreshing themselves with a cool drink of water.

Obsessions...

A friend of mine came to visit for the last few days.  Justin Severino owns a new restaurant in Pittsburg called Cure, which focuses on traditional cooking methods and sustainable sourcing for produce.  All of my friends know that if you come to visit me in the middle of the season, you will have to work in order to spend time with me - there's too much to do to take an entire day off.  Luckily most of my friends are foodies so they enjoy the experience.

On Monday night the two of us went to dinner here at The Inn. Of course no need to say that the experience and the food were both beyond belief, but it was really amazing for me was seeing all of my produce in action. The vegetables were truly transformed with all of their best attributes on display. The new tomato dish was my favorite; cherry tomatoes nestled in an incredibly flavored jellied gazpacho and covered with beautiful edible flowers.

A Symphony of Our Garden’s Miniature Heirloom Tomatoes

with Jellied Gazpacho Consommé and Basil Granite

Tuesday morning we woke up early and started harvesting.  As we picked through the garden I couldn’t help commenting on how happy I was to see all the beneficial insects setting up shop in the garden. Justin couldn’t help commenting on the fact that I am obsessed with bugs.  It’s true, and I think as a farmer you have to be.

So, to prove his point, I’m going to obsess a little bit. This week I saw tomato hornworm covered with parasites, which lay eggs on the caterpillar and kill it for me. 

A tomato horn worm

with the beneficial parasites

I also saw a ton of assassin bugs newly hatched, which are general predators in the garden. 

On top of that I released a lot of different insects in the last few weeks and all of those populations seem to be doing well. I released ladybugs in the garden and the greenhouse to help with aphids and white fly, and green lacewing larvae to try to combat these pesky potato leafhoppers, just to name a few. There are many more beneficials out there in the garden and this biodiversity is a sign of over all garden health that puts a smile on my face.

800 ladybugs being released into the garden

Besides looking at bugs, a lot of work happened in the garden in the last week. All of the shallots and onions were pulled and laid out to dry and cure for storage. 

I seeded flagrano beans for the fall, as well as another generation of carrots and beets.  Weeding and harvesting dominated the week.  The tomatoes and eggplant are coming in well this year and colored bell peppers are right around the corner.  Other than that I am still harvesting everything that was on the list last week. 

Hope you all have a great week and keep an eye out for all those beneficial insects out there in the garden, remember that not all bugs are bad guys. 

What a week...

So sorry for the delay, but I have been unbelievably busy.  The heat wave did end, though it left some issues in its wake.  We got into the temperatures that cause blossom drop in both the eggplant and peppers, as well as a little bit in the slicing tomatoes. Blossom drop is exactly what it sounds like - the flowers form but drop to the ground before pollination.  It occurs when the temperatures are above 95 during the day and above 75 at night for several days. Luckily it is a temporary situation and the flowers will hold after the heat is over. I have removed the first generation of cucumbers from the greenhouse, and put in the second.  In the greenhouse I have started all of the fall cauliflower and romanesco, as well as a late season attempt at some okra. Other than that pruning and trellising continue as well as weeding, seeding successional crops and planting.   


Blue, keeping cool in the shade of the cherry tomatoes.

The zucchini and summer squash are about finished for the season.  The squash vine borers (SVB for short) are here in force and the plants are dropping like flies. At this stage of the season, when SVB is so abundant, it seems pointless to plant more.  The SVB is a moth that lays one or two small red eggs on summer squash plants. The eggs hatch and the small grub bores its way into the vine at the base of the plants.  The grub uses the hollow space within the vine to move its way up the center of the plant, eating along the way.  They can live in there for up to a month before the otherwise healthy looking plant wilts out of nowhere, when it can no longer uptake water.  There aren’t too many ways to prevent them organically, at least not on a large scale. For the home gardener here are a few tips; these pests don’t show up until later in the season, so you can plant early. SVB generally fly around to lay there eggs in the early afternoon, so you can cover the plants with row cover during this time. You can also scout daily for the grubs or the detritus that they leave when boring into the base of the plant.  If you find a hole soon after the grub has entered, you can slice into the vine and get it out. The vine will heal. Also if you would like to avoid them all together you can plant trombocino squash which can be harvested small and used like zucchini (it is delicious) or large when it has the same color and tastes like butternut.  Butternut squash is generally not bothered either.  These varieties of squash have a narrow vine center which is a less desirable home for SVB.

 Most of my time these days seem to be taken up by harvesting. Cherry tomatoes are up to 30 quarts a week, slicer tomatoes over 40 lbs.  The shishito peppers produce like crazy at around 10 lbs per week, doesn’t seem like much but there are probably 30 peppers per lb. The haricovert beans aren’t coming in strong yet due to an outbreak of potato leafhopper, but as the pest gets more under control which is a slow but progressive process, they should bounce back. Cucumbers are on a month long hiatus while the new plants develop.  Charentais melons are coming in, as well as a few cantaloupes. Other than that I am still harvesting swiss chard, shallots, cippolini onions, carrots, beets, herbs and demi greens.  

Cucumbers from the garden turned into bread and butter and garlic dill pickles.

4th of July Week...

This week was the week of the storm. It blew through on Friday night, and I spent the whole time watching my newly built hoop house, full of all of my cucumber and melon babies, through the window, praying that the wind wouldn’t pick it up up and away.  Surprisingly, considering the strength of the wind, there was no mangled steel.  Overall I did not get too much damage; the eggplant and peppers all fell down, but they didn’t snap so I staked them back up on Saturday morning and all but one seem to be doing fine. The haricovert beans that I am currently harvesting were blown down to the ground with no real solution, the plants seem ok for the most part, but having to pick through the tangled mess adds quite a bit to the harvest time. The biggest loss was the currant tomatoes, though they didn’t die completely, a lot of the major branches snapped.  I fixed some with duct tape (yes you can do that) and those seem to be holding well. So in the end I think I made out pretty well considering the severity of the storm.  Our new scare crow, the “scary crow” was also knocked down, but not damaged so we will have him back up in a few days. He is a monstrosity of a scare crow in the form of a giant bird with an 8 ft wing span, made from grape vine, moss and of course, straw.  Gregory, the florist here at The Inn and myself spent several late evenings last week constructing and installing him, and we are both pretty proud of what came out of it.

It is really hot again this week, but we are still in the realm of good growing weather, I have been keeping up with the irrigation so everything is happy.  The latest generation of beans, carrots and beets are starting to pop up.  I am planting the second to last generation of summer squash this week, and the second generation of cucumbers are almost ready to move into the hoop house. The romanesco, and cauliflower have all popped in the green house, so it is starting to look like fall in there (as long as you can ignore the 110 degree temperatures). The cherry tomatoes have out grown their 6 foot stakes, so I will have to come up with a plan to extend them this week, it is hard to know how high they will go considering we just hit July! 

The harvest list grew quite a bit in the last week.  We finally have our own shishito peppers, a beautiful little pepper from Japan with a complex, slightly bitter flavor. There are lots of green bell peppers as well but I will wait for them to ripen before I begin to pick them, when ripe they will come in red, orange and yellow.  Slicing tomatoes are beginning to roll in though right now we are still waiting for the red varieties. (those varieties that are yellow and orange have a tendancy to come in first, even though one of the red varieties boasts a shorter “days to harvest”) The cherry tomatoes are starting to come in strong, and we are even getting eggplant.  All of the above are about three weeks earlier than last year and I am not complaining. Hope you all have a great up coming week, sorry for the lack of photos, but my internet is still down, I’ll add extra next week.  

Is it hot enough for ya?

This week has been hot and the weekend promises to be hotter.  The weather put a real damper on getting things done. Sprinklers and drip systems have been running full tilt, partially just to keep things cool, and unfortunately these high temperatures have put an end to all of our spring vegetables. The turnips, radishes, broccoli and the last of the lettuce have all gone to flower, making them bitter and inedible. On a better note the first tiny eggplant and peppers are hanging from the plants, I ate a few cherry tomatoes and the slicing tomatoes are starting to ripen.



            This week there was no planting due to the high temps, but I will play catch up over the next week. The last of the new irrigation system was finally installed and all of the straw mulch is now down. I trellised the last planting of tomatoes, as well as the flowers, and built tee-pees for the pole beans.  Weeding is just about finished, though it looks like we need to head back to the beginning and start again. 

The harvest has been really good this week; frisee, lots of onions, beets, fava beans, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, fennel, dill, cilantro, basil and other herbs, the first of the zinnias and celosia for the floral department, beets and swiss chard.  Sorry I don’t have time for more folks, but as I said earlier I am way behind.  Have a good week, and stay hydrated.