This Week on the Farm 10/14
The weather this week has been absolutely GORGEOUS!! Highs have been in the low to mid 70’s and we haven’t worried about frost for about 10 days now. However that may (and probably will) change soon. The leaves are falling quickly off the trees and the burr oak has already lost about 95% of its leaves. It would really feel like fall, if it wasn’t so warm.
The weather has helped us to keep going on our cleanup efforts in the field and to give our fall crops another added boost. These last ten days or so really make us regret letting the early frosts take some of our warm-season crops, otherwise we might have even had tomatoes or peppers this week in the boxes. Well, I guess we live and learn. The pepper plants are all cleaned up, which took up Tuesday afternoon, and we have a couple of other crops to clean up before we can seed most of what we call “F6” into a cover crop for winter.
On Wednesday we dug the white potatoes for the boxes this week, as well as the sweet potatoes. We have no specialized potato digging equipment, so its just back breaking labor to get these beauties out of the ground. It is really disappointing, especially when digging sweet potatoes, to put the fork in the ground and stab the largest, most beautiful ones right through the middle.
It’s such labor in fact, that we’re already in the process of getting some equipment to do this job for us for next year! Tyler enjoys perusing the internet on his breaks searching for pieces of specialty vegetable equipment. It is really amazing how inventive farmers can be when it means saving labor. We are still on the look out for another tractor for next season.
Thankfully most of the backbreaking work, such as weeding, is done for the season. Almost all of our time is spent working on clean up and getting the fields ready for the winter. Most of our energy is going toward brainstorming ideas for next year’s expansion. Questions like what varieties of veggies to plant, how much should we plant of each crop, where to plant them, how can we be more efficient weeding and harvesting each crop, and other things like that need to be answered before we order seed for next year. We also need to figure out irrigation for our new field and how to protect that field from pests. Another big question is how much extra labor we will need. We hope to solve some of our labor issues by having volunteer sessions. We hope that this provides all of you with the opportunity to meet new people and get first hand experience on where your vegetables come from and how they grow through the season.
Well after this week we have two more boxes to go out. We ask that on your last pick up day that you bring some bags to transfer your produce into so that we may keep the blue totes for next year’s use. We will remind you again next week so don’t worry!
We also would ask that if you haven’t returned an evaluation form to us yet, please do. We have heard many good things and many things that we can do to improve. We want to hear from all of you! So if you have lost your form, please email us so that we can send you another one.