A Chill in the Air

What a beautiful stretch of weather! Except for a very few brief showers we have had nothing but clear sunny and cool days for all of September. The last day with significant rainfall was August 29 when we received 1.75 inches. This dry spell will no doubt counter balance all the rain earlier in the summer and the record books will list 2009 as an average year for rain. But don't be fooled, the recorded rain for June, July, and August in Albany was the third wettest on record and the two wetter years were both in the 1800's. So... we did have good reason to complain about all the rain.

The clear weather has also brought cool temperatures in the past few nights. We woke on Saturday morning to go to market and found heavy frost on the truck windshield. There were only scattered patches of frost on the lawn and temperatures were not low enough to kill any plants, but it was downright chilly. Out came the long underwear, wool hats, and gloves to go to market. It warmed up fast, but stayed cool under the pavilions when we weren't moving around too much. The threat of frost has also brought out all the row cover to protect the crops and try to keep them growing a little longer. Sometimes I feel more like a chamber maid than a farmer... put on the sheets, take off the sheets, day after day. The photos this week give a good idea of the state of the farm this time of year. Just a few sections of field with crops left on them, field tunnels and greenhouses closed up for warmth, and lots of row cover. Note: we were on the roof cleaning the wood stove chimney - I'm always impressed by what a great view it is up there.

Activities on the farm start to shift this time of year from seeding and planting to clean-up and putting fields to bed. The last planting for the season went in this past week - a late patch of boc choi and stir-fry greens. There are two more weeks of greenhouse baby greens to seed, but all the outside crops are finally in. This next week we will start to get our winter cover crops seeded on all the open sections of field. We usually seed a mixture of oats, peas and vetch at this time of year and shift to rye and vetch on the sections we don't get to until October. The season marches on.

It's Harvest Season

September 13... How did that happen? Where did summer go? I guess time flies when you're insanely busy. The August market season is always a whirlwind, and this year was no exception. We survived - a little beat up and weary, but still standing.

While we were stressing out over the whole tomato blight situation and worrying about losing a major crop, much to our dismay, we ran out of lettuce. A number of factors led to this unfortunate event: hot and muggy weather, mold and fungus diseases, and weeds. It seems that no matter how much lettuce we plant, at some point this happens almost every season. August is just not a good month for greens (there's a reason it's called "Spring Mix"). We had a couple of weeks at market where we were running out of greens less than half way through the market. We hate to disappoint customers, but there was nothing we could do about it. Most of our customers were very sympathetic and that was greatly appreciated. This past week we had a bit of a comeback in the lettuce patch and made it through the entire market with a little left over to spare. If we are careful and do not over cut, we should have a steady supply of greens through the rest of the season.

Despite the shortage of greens, there is no lack of food at our stand or throughout the market. This time of year offers the greatest variety of crops of the whole season. Summer crops are still going strong, and now many of the fall crops are coming in as well. Here's just some of the crops we had this past week: green beans, baby boc choi, broccoli, broccoli raab, cilantro, cucumbers, escarole, shiitake mushrooms, potatoes, peppers, radicchio, radish, scallions, spinach, sprouts, stir-fry greens, tomatoes, and melons. In the next few weeks we will also be adding: cauliflower, kale, broccolini, and salad turnips. I guess there is good reason to call this time of year the "harvest season". This is the time to stock up and stuff yourself on good healthy local vegetables - it won't be long before winter forces most of us back to the sterile produce aisle of the grocery stores.


It's also the time to get your fill of local heirloom tomatoes. Despite our worst fears of Late Blight on the tomatoes, we have managed to salvage a small, but respectable crop. For once the weather was on our side to help slow down the disease. The fungus showed up on our farm a little later than it did on some other surrounding farms, and happened to coincide with the start of a hot sunny dry period (one of the few we actually had). Late blight has a fairly narrow temperature range that it can thrive in and it does not do well in higher temperatures. To try to take advantage of this we closed up most of the tomato hoop houses and tried to cook the blight spores. We also reluctantly decided to spray copper, the only allowable organic fungicide, to try to save the uninfected fruit. We only sprayed twice, about ten days apart. I'm not sure which of these things had the most effect, but the result was after about two weeks, very little of the fruit was infected with blight. While this was a big relief, our yield is still greatly reduced. As of mid-September we have harvested a little over 1500 pounds. In past years we have generally harvested about 3000 pounds by this point. With the cooler temperatures and shorter days the tomatoes are really starting to slow in their ripening. I expect we will continue to have them for awhile yet, but in far less quantities than we've had over the past few weeks. Get 'em while you can!