We’ve had a great week here on the farm. We finally feel caught up with all the weeding and crop maintenance alongside the daily harvest routine. Our fall carrots are slowly coming to size and all our storage carrot beds have germinated. We thinned and weeded the beds by hand so they’ll produce a bountiful harvest for us. This is the last big harvest week for tomatoes and they’ll soon be slowing down as the last fruits ripen.
Harvesting carrots with the broadfork
Cleaning up beds and seeded radish bed
Our winter tunnel crops have all germinated in the nursery. It’s a relief to know that we are nearing the end of our bed preparation and turnover season. Now as crops come out, the beds will be seeded with a winter cover crop of oats. The rutabagas and kohlrabis are getting large and the storage potatoes are ready to come out of the ground. For now you can still look forward to our soil-grown peppers and tomatoes at the farmers market this weekend and in your CSA bags!
Harvesting daikon radishes
Part of what makes us love what we do are the seasonal visitors we get in the gardens. Since we work outside every day we are well aware of the changing of the seasons and the comings and goings of our bird population. We are gardeners but also naturalists. To our delight this week we had a visitor in the garden, a great blue heron. The heron is an apex predator in the garden environment. He has been eating our toads and he could also eat snakes. We observed him trying to catch grasshoppers (unsuccessfully). It was pretty comical.
Hunting in the squash forest
Great blue heron in the garden
We can co-habitat with him since he doesn’t seem to mind our presence in the garden and since we probably have a few toads to spare. Speaking of co-habiting, we haven’t had any deer damage lately so we think the fishing line “fence” is working and we’ve also been hearing coyotes close by at night. As it should be, our garden is a part of nature and nature doesn’t know the boundaries of the garden.
What’s in the CSA this week:
Lettuce mix
Green onion
Cherry tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes
Bell peppers
Daikon radish
Summer squash or Italian frying pepper
Carrots
Mini cucumbers
Parsley