This Week’s Harvest
Beets OR Cauliflower
Broccoli
Bell Peppers
Mustard Greens OR Broccoli Rabe
Lettuce
Garlic
Recipes
Fennel, Rutabaga, and White Bean Hash
Seared Sausages with Mustard Greens (bell peppers can sub for jalapeno peppers and you can add pepper flakes for spice)
Escarole and Apple Salad (you can sub flat leaf parsley for the celery)
Farm News
I see the hashtag #cantstopwontstop over the internet and that was certainly us this weekend! With rain in the forecast on Monday we had a substantial to do list to get done before then. After being at market from 7 to 3 we put in another 4 hours of work. Ben hilled the beds that will house our garlic, completing the first step of garlic planting. We had too much other stuff to do to actually plant the garlic but hilling the beds will allow them to dry out quicker and hopefully we’ll be back to the project shortly.
The jobs that took priority over garlic were harvesting the sweet potatoes and seeding cover crop. On Saturday night I got drip tape and plastic mulch out of the sweet potato beds so we could use the potato digger and dig the beds a second time, unearthing potatoes that got buried the first time. We had harvested some sweet potatoes last week but the yields were really terrible so we wondered if some potatoes were still buried. We switched the crew’s day off and had them come in Sunday. Ben double dug 11 beds of sweet potatoes revealing what we suspected: that about half of our crop was still in the ground! He left the potato collecting to us and went off to get 2,000 pounds of cover crop seeded.
Seeding winter rye and hairy vetch over 12 acres before the rain was huge. This practice is crucial to soil building and having productive crops. We’re setting ourselves up for success next season. Ben finished seeding with the cone spreader at dusk. We gathered the final bed of sweet potatoes by tractor light. By barn light I moved 1,000 lbs of sweet potatoes from the trailer to the storage room and by tractor light Ben lightly disced over the 12 acres he seeded to bury the seeds for good germination. It felt so good to have a truck full of empty seed sacks at the end of the day. It also felt good (or as good as a back ache can feel) to have collected 33 more bins of sweet potatoes. (By the way, the sweet potatoes now cure to sweeten up and will be in the final 2 boxes)
We (barely) stayed on top of family duties as well, squeezing a birthday party and Cub Scout obligation into the weekend. And we managed to remember halfway through Saturday that it was our wedding anniversary! We’re in the final push, eager for a break, but also determined to close out the season in good condition.