A mild and wet week is in store for us at the farm as we head into the latter part of fall. We've begun to harvest beets and carrots, our main fall root crops, with a total of about 25 beds (an acre) to be undercut, topped, washed and put into storage. The beet harvest so far is looking pretty weak, but we planted more than we needed, and beets aren't super popular, so we'll have plenty. I'm extremely happy to report that our carrots have sized up nicely, are tasting very good after the hard freezes we had last week, and that our first bed yielded around 1,500 pounds, which is quite respectable. And there are 11 more beds to go!
Carrots are the coolest crop once you get past the slow/painful germination, and the fact they don't compete with weeds at all. I like them because of the fact they are the hardest crop to germinate and establish. If one can sow and establish a good stand of carrots, everything else is like a walk in the park. They germinate slowly and need to be kept wet until the tiny seedlings sprout and emerge from the soil, which can take 2 weeks when it's cool. Once you get past all that, they're great in terms of yield, they
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A winter CSA medium share
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last for 6 months in storage, and when they grow/mature in cooler weather, they're amazingly flavorful and sweet. What a great backbone for a vegetable operation; a crop that is challenging, long lasting, popular, colorful, and extra nutritious.
We're about 75% of the way through our fall hoop house planting with 6 left to plant. I suppose when you consider that we've got 6 hoops that are currently planted in lettuce, kale, and chard, and that they'll be harvested by the middle of November, we've actually got about 12 more hoops to plant over the next 3 weeks, by Thanksgiving. I have to say that it feels really cool how we've learned to keep planting and harvesting continuously in these hoops. Only a few years ago, we were so exhausted by the end of summer and the hell of overwhelming work summer can represent, that we didn't even bother to plant our hoops in winter; we simply used them in summer for tomatoes. What a shame! Now that we've learned to come up for air at summer's end, we've implemented a continuous planting schedule that maintains our very nice flow of produce year round.
"Off season" hoop house growing has another fantastic benefit. Many of the hoop crops we grow in fall, winter, and spring are heavy feeding crops that use many of the excess minerals and nutrients that tend to build up in hoop houses over time. Because it never rains in the hoops, and we have to irrigate them, certain minerals tend to build up and create imbalances over time. Rain water is basically distilled, and so it tends to leach minerals out of the soil, whereas the groundwater we use to irrigate is mineral rich, as is all groundwater in the Midwest. There are many solutions. Some people have moveable greenhouses that allow rains to purge excess minerals. We could pull off our greenhouse plastic at some point, for a month or two, and let rains do some leaching/mineral balancing too.
What I'm trying to do instead is soil test a lot, understand which hoops have which excesses, deficiencies, or imbalances, and then carefully only add what is needed, being very careful not to add anything that is in excess. When we only add minerals that are deficient, we balance nutrients in the soil. Plants can take up more nutrients and grow best when soil minerals are balanced, and limiting factors are removed. This is a big reason for/part of the crop rotation. We hope you enjoy the results.
-- Chris
