Halftime Preparations

We're just about halfway between the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox. There are probably a few fancy names for this time, but none come to mind. This August has been kind to us so far (we'll see what tomorrow's storms have in store). After the heat and humidity and excessive rainfall of July, August has been a dream. I'm sure we'll have a few more days in the 90s, but this weather is sure a wake up call to incoming autumn.

We're always planning ahead and thinking down the road because crops need to break dormancy and germinate months before they're consumed, and ground needs to be prepared for their homes. It's a bit strange to visualize harvests for October and November right now, but this must happen now in order to harvest then. Plant growth varies significantly throughout the year (obviously), thanks to daylength and temperature, and I find it more difficult to change gears and prepare for the slow down after summer compared to dealing with the increased growth rate in late spring and through summer.

For fall harvests, there's a fine line between starting crops too early, where quick growth results in too-early maturity and susceptibility to later cold, compared to starting crops too late, when they don't have enough time to mature before the harvest season ends or cold and darkness put the breaks on their rate of growth. Because we added two additional weeks to the Main Season CSA, we'll be harvesting a bit later in November for a larger group than we've had with the Late Fall CSA.

In November my preference is to harvest most crops in tunnels where we don't have to deal with frost and random too-cold nights like we do for outside crops (and where our fingers stay a bit warmer while harvesting). It's probably impossible to pinpoint an exactly perfect time to start all the crops for all of the tunnels for the final four weeks of the season due to wildly fluctuating temperatures. To deal with this we simply grow many different crops in multiple successions. It's easy to overthink it all, but it's also good to strive for perfection a little bit, then know when to put the breaks on that thought process.