Out of the Fields

We missed the opportunity to take pictures while harvesting sweet potatoes but here is proof that they're no longer in the soil. Following harvest, we sowed the final round of cover crop seeds (winter rye) and incorporated them with the disc harrow. The sweet potatoes need to 'cure' in heated storage for a couple of weeks where they'll slowly convert starches to sugars.

I know I think and say this way too often, but I do love this time of year. It's the combination of perfect weather for working in, the colors of the farmscape, the worklist getting shorter, the fields looking nice and tidy, and the shrinking of the farm footprint that we need to be conscious of right now. It's also the comfort that comes with stowing a good harvest of roots, tubers, and storage crops to carry us through many weeks of CSA distribution. Yields of almost all crops this fall have been ideally satisfying. I can't think of one crop I'm disappointed with. On the other hand, I don't think anything is what I would call a 'bumper', more just a perfect amount below that threshold. Our goal over the next five weeks of Main Season and the following five weeks of Late Fall will be to distribute shares that are an ideal balance between fresh greens and lettuces, roots and tubers, necessary alliums, and specialty crops like fennel, celery, cabbage, and napa, all while trying to give you as much choice as possible in the pick up room.

Our list of storage crops to pull out of the ground continues to shrink. With the aforementioned sweet potatoes successfully retrieved, what's left includes rutabaga (everybody's favorite!); the final round of beets; more storage radishes (if needed); napa, red, and savoy cabbages; and hopefully carrots (sown late after an unexpected initial germination failure).

While in storage crops still need to be maintained. Moisture and temperature requirements vary. We are fortunate to have three separate crop storage facilities. Sweet potatoes are currently curing at 75 degrees in their own room with the remnants of the winter squash harvest. Potatoes and onions share a cold and dry storage room set at 45 degrees. All other storage crops go in our moist and cold cooler, set at 38 degrees. In there we still monitor the crops and occasionally hose them down with water. Space constraints are still an issue. Each unit is the size of an old horse stall, because that's what they were. Rumor has it that when there is a full moon on Halloween on a Friday a horse named Anchor runs out of the barn with a cabbage, a squash, and a potato on its back.