Warm Up

This beautiful autumn continues even though we did endure four straight mornings of almost-heavy frost and one or two mornings of possibly subfreezing temperatures. All of our crops currently growing are cold and frost tolerant and didn't mind the dip in temperature. Any lingering annual summer weeds bit the dust, or more accurately, froze up real good. Frost and light freezes sweeten the crops as they convert starches to sugars while they deal with the cold. We did have to adapt and adjust our harvest schedule since the frost didn't burn off fully until after 9am.

I am very thankful for our 15 years of farming experience during weather and temperature fluctuations this time of the season. Knowing that we didn't have to cover any of the crops with floating row cover really saved us a lot of time and effort (and oftentimes frustration). We put a lot of trust in the forecast low but always do assume it will get colder on the farm than the forecasts show. So we are careful but don't want to engage in unnecessary tasks. Years ago I did make a decision to put up more tunnels for growing on the shoulder ends of the season to purposely avoid dealing with row cover out in the field. I guess we had enough frustrating experiences with it and wanted the guaranteed protection of the tunnel instead of the gamble with the covers in the field. A lot of the time the cold is preceded by and concurrent with extremely windy events. Billowing cover on top of plants can inflict more damage than frost on uncovered plants.

Hey, go Phillies!