Two Feet in the Dirt

• This year has really been feast-or-famine when it comes to rain and this isn’t the first time that we’ve gone a couple of weeks with no rain followed by nearly two inches overnight. The biggest challenge with inconsistent rain is germinating our direct-seeded crops. We plant in three different ways. Some things are planted via transplant. These seeds are started inside in trays until they are between 4 and 8 weeks old and then are planted out into the field. Transplanted crops range from lettuce heads and kale to tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. A very small number of crops (potatoes and garlic) are planted from live plant matter. Garlic is grown by putting the actual cloves into the ground whereas potatoes require planting pieces of a potato!

My favorite type of planting, however, is the direct-seeded crops, where the seeds are put directly into the soil on the farm and the plants grow from there. The reason I prefer these is probably because these include many of my favorites to grow, from all types of baby greens to radishes and salad turnips. All of our cover crops also fall into this direct-seeded category. Whereas we can run drip irrigation tubing to water our transplants during periods of low rain, the direct-seeded crops are usually planted too closely to irrigate in this way and, more importantly, require overhead watering in order to germinate. Ensuring these have enough overhead water to germinate can turn into quite an onerous task in the absence of rain, requiring daily hand watering until the seeds begin to grow. While this is achievable with the individual beds of vegetable crops, the amount of space that we have to plant with cover crops as we gradually shut down beds for the winter is too much to water by hand and is often too spread out to water by sprinkler. Therefore, my approach given the inconsistent rain this year has been to get beds totally prepared to plant cover crop and then to drop everything the day before a definite rain and go out and seed as much cover crop as I can! So far it has worked out fairly well and we have a few nice stands of cover crop already growing.

This week, we’ll continue to have a bounty of fall harvest, with a great mix of both cool and warm season crops. We’ll be moving into a new variety of green head lettuce this week, which is one of my favorites. A mix between a butter head and a romaine, this variety offers tender outer leaves along with nice, crisp leaves on the interior. See below for the full harvest list. The online store will be open Thursday from noon until midnight!

Farmers Katie & Mike

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• Harvest List:

• Lettuce salad mix
• Arugula
• Hearty winter mix
• Lettuce
• Hakurei turnips
• Radishes
• Scallions
• Kale
• Collard greens
• Onions
• Chard
• Carrots
• Beets
• Cabbage
• Escarole
• Garlic
• Potatoes
• Peppers
• Kohlrabi
• Spinach
• Zucchini/Summer squash
• Tomatoes
• Eggplant
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