Two Feet in the Dirt

It’s hard to believe we’re already to the end of the 2020 season and nearly to Thanksgiving! This week, I wanted to use the blog post for two purposes, the first being to thank all of you sincerely for your incredible support this year. This year has been a challenging one for everyone everywhere and has certainly been a hard one for small businesses. We made the decision to stick with direct deliveries for the entire 2020 season as we believed this was the best way to keep both ourselves and all of you as safe as possible. But, of course, we could not have done this without the weekly...

Although we only have two weeks of deliveries left, a great thing about many fall vegetables is how long they can be stored. Cabbage is a perfect example and even comes with it’s own built-in storage container, ie, the outer leaves. Cabbage can keep for weeks in the refrigerator. I would recommend putting it in a plastic bag. However, the outer leaves also act as a “bag” of sorts. When you go to use the cabbage, simply peel off any outer leaves that are yellowing and you’ll see that these will have helped keep the inner leaves fresh and green. In fact, when harvesting cabbage from the field, we leave...

Fall planting is always the most challenging to plan as you never know how the weather will play out. If it’s a cold fall, it is possible to end up with a harvesting gap as growth slows. In contrast, with a warm fall like we’re having this year, it’s easy to end up with multiple plantings of the same crop becoming harvestable at the same time! This week, that is the case for lettuce and, as a result, we will have a wide selection of different lettuce varieties available. We will be harvesting red and green butter heads, red romaine, red and green leaf lettuce, and romaine hearts, making it a...

It has been a very warm autumn so far. Despite some unusually early light frosts and some more over this last weekend, we have yet to have any heavy frosts or freezes that would put an end to the season for summer crops. While we’ve passed the first harvest wave for our tomatoes, the plants have actually put on a huge amount of beautiful new green growth in the last few weeks and some of the cherry tomato plants are even flowering again! After a weekend with lows of in the thirties, we’re looking at a week with highs into the low 80s several times, a definite oddity for late...

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...

We did end up having several light frosts last week as temperatures dipped into the mid-to-low thirties for three nights in a row, a true rarity for mid-September! However, most of the warm-weather crops survived the shock to varying degrees. The basil, which is one of the most cold-sensitive crops we grow, experienced some noticeable damage. Mike pruned off the affected areas last week, so it will be a wait-and-see game before we know if there will be enough regrowth and recovery for harvest this week. The tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant, all of which are quite tall at this point, were largely unaffected by the light ground-level frosts. Even the...