September 13th, 2023

What’s in your share?

• Beets

• Yellow Onions

• Garlic

• Salad Mix

• Sweet Peppers

• Tomatoes

• Cherry Tomatoes

• German Butterball Potatoes

Ali harvesting tomatoes for today’s share. The three beds on her left were tomatoes last week, but they’ve been transitioned to spinach. It’s tough call to decide when to terminate a tomato bed, but this is how we make the decision: Our tomatoes produce gorgeous, delicious tomatoes for a month. After that, quality and flavor start to decrease, and production slows. Because we have such a short growing season, in order to have spinach in October and November, we need to have it seeded by September. If we kept those tomatoes growing, we’d have sub-par tomatoes for only about more more weeks and we’d miss the window for having spinach. We always plant three beds of tomatoes “late”, and we keep those going until it freezes.

Summer crops are quickly waning as we get closer to cooler weather. The shares have been looking similar these past couple weeks as we try to savor the last of summer and before the fall crops start coming in. We had a bed of bok choy planned for harvest this week that was looking beautiful two weeks ago. When we uncovered it to make the forecast last week, it looked like there was some insect damage that would be easy enough to avoid, but alas, when we went to harvest it yesterday, it just wasnt worth it. Summer planting for fall is one of the trickiest times for planting. Heat, insects, and dry weather are at their peak; while fall crops thrive in cool, moist conditions - when the life cycles of many pests are entering the stages of dormancy.

The potato harvest continues. This variety, “French Fingerling” is a favorite over here. Sadly, the certified organic seed we got had a disease, which we learned of when we picked up the seed. It drastically reduced the yield, but there’s still enough for everyone to get some and it could have been worse.

That said, we figured that might happen, so we have another bok choy bed to plant this week! It will be coming into maturity right about when we get the first frost, which sweetens the leaves and deepens their green color. We’ve been checking weekly on all the other fall crops (we keep literally all of them covered with row cover, because the caterpillars that ate the bok choy also devour all the other brassicas that we have planted for fall) and they all look great. We have broccoli, broccolini, kohlrabi, kale, napa cabbage, round cabbage, radishes, turnips, spinach, romaine, and radicchio still coming! We’re going to harvest the winter squash this week or next week and let them cure for a coupld weeks before distributing. We have two beds of sweet potatoes to harvest and cure, too. We’re entirely done seeding in the propagtion house, and have only about ten more beds to plant before planting season comes to an end.

Winter squash is coming! Butternut, delicata, and carnival.