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!