October 2022

October 3, 2022 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

September has flown by in a whirl of work and Caleb beginning school and it’s hard to believe that October is already here. After an excessively hot summer, we’re having some cooler weather at last, something I always look forward to as a sign that the season is slowing down. This weekend we may even get our first light frost of the year, with temperatures (at this point) forecast to drop into the 30s. This may mean the end of the remaining summer crops (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, and cucumbers), although we’ll have to see how cold it ends up getting. The fall crops are loving the change in weather. The...

In the kitchen!

August 3, 2021 In the Kitchen, Market newsletters, Other recipes, Weekly Updates

With the peak of tomato season upon us, the tomato harvest has been crazy! This week, we brought in nearly 40 pounds of cherry tomatoes and over 300 pounds of slicing tomatoes and that was just in the first harvest of the week. We will likely at least double those numbers by the week’s end! Unsurprisingly, we’ve gotten creative over the years and found out-of-the-box ways to make use of tomatoes. One of our favorite finds was a way for short-term preserving cherry tomatoes by “sun-drying” them in the oven at a low heat for several hours. The result is bit-sized morsels of sweetness that can be added to sandwiches,...

Hot!

June 29, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s hard to believe each year that, right as the summer harvest is beginning, we’re also starting to seed transplants for the fall! This week, I seeded all of the fall brassicas, from kale and collards to cabbage and cauliflower. Meanwhile, the spring kale and collards are gradually moving towards their end as heat and pest pressure increase. At the same time, the cucumbers and zucchini are hitting full stride and the first eggplant are beginning to size up on the plants. (The picture above is of an eggplant flower, which I find one of the most beautiful!) Our field beans are unusually late as they dealt with multiple dips...

June already!

May 31, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

As always seems to be the case, we’ve gone from famine to feast with rainfall. After several weeks of no rain at all, in the last week we received nearly two and a half inches of rain over just a few days! The summer crops have also had a rather strange start to life in the field, with their first week in the ground marked by record high temperatures that made watering them multiple times a day necessary. This was promptly followed this past weekend by temperatures plummeting to record lows, bottoming out in the low forties at night. After completing the depressing task of pulling all of our onion...

Rain, rain go away

August 23, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

The rain just can’t seem to leave us be. Last night we received another dousing of several inches in just a few hours. As we’re in the midst of fall planting, this excessive moisture and heavy rain is a concern in a way it wasn’t in the spring, when the crops were much more established and the diseases that prey on crops in the late summer had not yet arrived. Many of the seedlings newly planted in the field were flattened by the downpour, although they will in all likelihood recover. More concerning is the appearance of mildew-type diseases on crops like the fall kale and cabbage on which I...

Changing seasons

April 27, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

As May approaches, big changes are happening on the farm. Outside, we finally broke ground on our last section of beds! We had decided to hold off on building these last five beds until the spring as we were already cramped for time last fall and figured we might as well leave the area protected by grass over winter. Mike plowed up the area last week and it’s definitely with a sigh of relief that we know we’ve completed the enormous task of breaking ground and building beds… at least for this year! Inside the hoop house, it’s hard to believe that the transition to summer is already happening. After...

Pulling and planting

November 6, 2016 Weekly Updates

With a steady succession of frosts every few nights, the garden is quickly becoming much more two dimensional. At this point, the three tallest crops, the eggplant, tomatoes, and beans, have been removed after getting significant frost damage. I was okay with sacrificing them to the frost before it happened, being pretty sick of harvesting tomatoes and beans by this point. But once it came to actually pulling the plants, I couldn’t help but be sad as that really does mark the beginning of the end of the season. At the start of the season, I was envisioning the garden as a source of home food, but was also planning to sell...

October Photo Shoot

October 28, 2016 Monthly Photo Shoots, Weekly Updates

We’ve had a chilly end to the month and it feels like winter is really on its way. This past week we had our first frost. I left the eggplant and tomato plants to fend for themselves. It’s good that I harvested off most of the edible fruit, as both suffered some serious frost damage to their leaves. We’re planning to start the big job of pulling them out this coming weekend. I decided to cover the peppers, which still had much more fruit on them, in order to protect them from the frost and that did the trick! We’ll be able to keep harvesting peppers for a least a little longer....

Peppers galore!

October 21, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools, Uncategorized, Weekly Updates

Fall is the time of year when most people think of harvesting greens and root crops from the garden. However, one thing that I always have a huge amount of in the fall is peppers. Because I like to harvest sweet peppers when they “color”, as opposed to what we think of as green peppers, it takes a good while for them to ripen. Therefore, I end up bringing in a majority of the harvest from mid-August onwards. And by this point, our fridge is more or less packed with peppers! Over the years, as with many other crops, I’ve narrowed my focus to growing the pepper varieties I particularly like- Carmen and...

A slower time

October 12, 2016 Weekly Updates

It’s been another rough couple of weeks as I try to recuperate from yet another cold! At least this time of year isn’t the worst to be forced to take a break. During the summer, even a few days away from the garden can lead to an unmanageable amount of backed-up work. However, right now is the sweet spot of the season. It’s still warm enough that everything is producing and therefore we don’t yet need to start the big job of ripping out plants and preparing the beds for winter. At the same time, it has cooled off enough that growth has slowed on both the crops and the weeds, meaning harvesting...

Two Feet in the Dirt

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