Farmers are always talking about the weather but this Sunday’s rain was definitely worth talking about. We got between 0.85 and 1 inch of rain, depending on which rain gauge you look at! We’ve been continuing to ease our way into fall as the days cooled down, except for a few mid-90s days last week, but this rain seems like a more concrete transition away from summer to autumn.
Beyond the weather though, what’s been happening the last week or so?
Transplanting and planting
We transplanted a lot of cauliflower and romanesco, plus some escarole as small, 2-inch tall plants. You can read a bit more about how we transplant here. We planted our garlic by planting cloves of “seed garlic.”
Harvesting the field corn and bloody butcher corn
After growing all summer and completely drying out, both were ready to harvest. The field corn is for our animals, the bloody butcher corn is for humans – now available as cornmeal or in whole kernels on the CSA member store, the online shop (for mail order), at our farmers markets, and some of the stores we sell to. Both of these corn varieties are much taller than the sweet corn that we harvested earlier this summer, and they’re harvested differently too. Instead of harvesting the ears by hand, Rye went through the field in the combine with a special head on the front that removes the ears of corn from the stalk and removes the kernels from each ear.
Mowing the sudan grasses maze
Now that Hoes Down attendees are done enjoying the maze, the sheep are enjoying it just as much, if not more. They made fast work of the maze, polishing it off in three days. This impressively tall summer cover crop field of sudan grass, black-eyed peas, buckwheat, cowpeas, sorghum, sunflowers, and sunn hemp (more about our summer cover cropping here).
And lots more
We’re gearing up to harvest olives for oil later this week. We’ve already started harvesting the olives for curing, also available for CSA members and at farmers markets. We’re also getting ready to shell walnuts that we just harvested, and the flower team has started to make wreaths and dried bouquets, which are available now at farmers markets and will be available to CSA members starting November 1 (next week).
Elaine Swiedler, CSA Manager