This Week on the Farm 10/7
Well, we have had our first couple of frosts on the farm. The peppers, tomatoes, and squash vines were killed by the frost. To some of you this means good news, no more jalapeño peppers. It does mean less variety in the boxes each week as we lose crops to the cold weather.
The covers have worked so far to protect the lettuce and other leafy crops from damage. We are hoping the warm weather this week boosts the growth on the turnips and radishes in the garden. So far they are edible, but still really small. If we can get them to grow a little more, we will be able to have them in the boxes for more than one week. Otherwise we will have to make up size by putting more of each item in each box.
We are still working on cleaning up the fields and getting them ready for winter. On Tuesday Don’s cousin Jim Dowdell stopped by to talk about the harvest and to offer us another piece of land for next year. It is a 4-4 1/2 acre plot just down the road to the west of us. Jim and his son Ben grow corn and soybeans, and the smaller plots of land like this one are not as useful to them as they would be for us. The land is close enough that we can keep an eye on it and the main issue right now is figuring out how to get water to the irrigation system we would need to set up. By adding land we can increase years between crops in the same field. This will help with disease and nutrient issues.
We would like to thank everyone who filled out an evaluation form and returned it to us. We take them very seriously and are already mentally adjusting next year’s planting list to reflect popular demand. The two most common items that people thought we had too much of were jalapeño peppers and greens. The reason that both of these items appeared so frequently in your boxes is that we had an abundance of them in the garden this year and instead of letting them sit and rot, we placed them in the boxes so you could use them or not as you saw fit.
People wrote that they would like to see more potatoes, cauliflower, broccoli, and other types of peppers, like yellow or orange bell peppers, in their boxes. The cauliflower and broccoli were problematic crops this year. The varieties we choose did not produce like we had anticipated. We are going to pick different varieties for next year and use the knowledge we gained this year to improve our crops. We agree, we would like to see more broccoli and cauliflower in the boxes!
Potatoes are done producing tubers by mid July or so. This means that we have a finite quantity of potatoes that need to last from August to the end of October. We had fewer potatoes in boxes earlier in the year to make sure we had potatoes for you at the end of the season. Next year we know to plant more potatoes in order to have larger quantities throughout the season. We also need to find a different variety of yellow potato because it did not produce as well as some of the other varieties. We would also like to increase the variety of potatoes to include some of the heirloom varieties.
If you did not receive an evaluation form but would like to fill one out, contact me at kate@burroakgardens.com. If you haven’t returned your form, please send it to us as we would really like to hear from you.