This Week on the Farm 9/11
Another exhausting week on the farm! At least the weather has been nice and we haven’t had to irrigate like in the beginning of the season. In fact it rained so much last week that our newest planting of lettuce seed was washed out and we had to replant the seed. The forecast for the next week doesn’t include a chance of frost, so we are pretty pumped.
Our new 3 pt mower worked like a charm. Tyler spent all day Friday and part of Saturday morning mowing in the near field to get ready for the Farm Stop and Barley Pop tour. Thankfully he checked the gear box for oil before he started mowing. There wasn’t any oil in the gear box and if he had started it up it would have ended very badly. Unlike the first time we hooked up the 3 pt rototiller, we didn’t have to adjust the length of the p.t.o. shaft on the mower, so hook up was much easier and faster.
The Farm Stop & Barley Pop on Saturday went really well and there was an excellent turn out. We would like to thank everyone who came to the farm on the tour. We had a lot of really great questions from people and we only wish we would have had more time to look at more crops.
The dinner portion of the tour was at Lapacek’s Orchard in Poynette and although it rained a little bit during the dinner, it was well worth it to see a double rainbow. We also had two groups of sandhill cranes fly over the tables that were set out in the middle of the orchard. It was a very pretty setting and the food was fantastic!
This week we have spent most of our time weeding fall plantings. We cleaned out the napa cabbage and broccoli plantings yesterday morning. With our friend Emma’s help we weeded the kohlrabi, Swiss chard, and part of our kale planting. In another couple of weeks those plantings will be harvestable. I am very excited at the prospect of kale chips and can’t wait for the planting to be mature enough to harvest.
We are working on weeding the snow peas and will get those trellised by the end of the week. We are going to try a different arrangement of the baler twine for the trellis system to have a more even distribution of twine for the pea plants to grab onto.
The first of the cherry tomatoes have turned red. Like all of the tomato plants this year it looks like we will have a very small harvest. Tyler and I have been brainstorming ideas about how to adjust timing and methodology for our tomato crop next year. Every year there are one or two problem crops, and this year tomatoes were definitely one of them.
We have two types of cabbage that we are harvesting this week. The smaller type that half shares will receive are actually the second head that the cabbage plants have produced this season. The full shares are getting the “Impala” cabbage, which looks a lot like the ones you see in the grocery store. I learned a very good tip about storing cabbage and that is to save one of the outer leaves when you cut up a portion of a cabbage. Cover the exposed area with the outer leaf and place in a plastic bag. The outer leaf will help keep the exposed area from drying out.
Remember to mark your calenders for our harvest potluck on September 23 from 12N to 6PM. We will have food and tours of the gardens. Let us know by September 20th if you will be coming so we make sure to have enough food.