- Savoy Cabbage
- Carrots
- Head Lettuce
- Yellow Onions
- Violet Queen Turnips
- Pie Pumpkin - truly meant to be turned into pie, with drier/sweeter flesh bred specifically for pie filling. But also perfectly happy to be seasonal Halloween decor in the meantime until the right baking day comes along.
- Italian Parsley
- Beets - Red, Gold and/or Chioggia
On Rotation:
- Romanesco
- Broccoli
Notes from the Field
This week is the final major push to get cover crops seeded. The eastern half of the farm is mostly already seeded and germination looks fantastic on the heels of our last rain. This Thursday I'll be seeding the western half of the farm and then hitching the horses to cultipack the seed in. The cultipacker is a heavy set of metal rollers packed closely togther over a 6' span that presses the seed into the ground to create better soil-to-seed contact, which improves germination. It's a piece of equipment I salvaged off an old homestead outside of Powers over a decade ago, and with the help of some friends with welding skills, put it back to use after a half a century of sitting in a blackberry thicket. My fingers are crossed for enough precip on Friday & Saturday to get this next round of cover crops to sprout. Our goal is to have as much of the farm planted to winter cover crops as possible by the end of October, at which point it's too late to coax most things to grow.
Most of our winter squash are done curing and are tucked into the bulging bays of the barn now. I ate my first Delicata this week and was blown away by how sweet they are this season.
Our strawberry crowns are scheduled to arrive from the nursery this week, so we'll be plenty busy for the next few weeks getting 9000 new bare-root strawberry plants into the ground. I'm excited to get them planted while we still have some good growing weather left; every day counts right now as the sun dips farther and farther south. The more growth the plants can put on now, the better our yields and fruit quality will be next summer.
We're harvesting our storage kohlrabi this week. As you can see from the photo below, they err towards the bigger-than-a-baby's-head size. You'll see them in your share in a few weeks. They're the sweetest, juiciest kohlrabi we grow.
Savor these last couple weeks of October. What a month.
