A cold snap and planting over 2,000 lettuce

The first day of November is here and none of our summer crops are looking that great.

Over the last week the temperatures dipped below 40 degrees for at least one night and severely damaged the remaining summer veggies.

The tomatoes and eggplants are turning brown and the plants are wilting which means they have been zapped of all their remaining energy for the season.

We will have a few remaining heirloom and cherry tomatoes this week and that will be the end of them.

Some of the eggplants still in the field look nice and we will harvest them this week and see how they react to determine whether we will have any next week. Most of the eggplant is smaller than we were harvesting a few weeks ago as they are growing slower in the colder temperatures and fewer hours of daylight.

The forecasted weather for the next week has lows every day rising into the 50s which will be nice. There is a chance of rain on Saturday.

We have finally finished transplanting all of our lettuce for the fall and early spring. There was about 15 trays of lettuce of all different varieties that we got in the ground on Monday.

It is pretty impressive to see all of the lettuce net to each other from the ones we are harvesting to the ones that we just planted.

Fortunately the wind that we had over the weekend died down by Monday so the plants didn’t have to deal with that stress while being transplanted.

The only crop we have left to transplant this fall will be our overwintering onions which are a few weeks out and we also still have some radishes to direct seed.

Seeing all the fields filled up with veggies is so awesome and hopefully we will be able to harvest off all of them all winter long.

Two Thursdays ago we planted our main planting of garlic. We actually planted a smaller amount in September which we will harvest for green garlic in the early spring. The main planting will be for heads of garlic that we will harvest next May or June.

The variety is the same as this year’s crop, California Early White, and we were able to get it through the large order Terra Firma Farm places. It comes already separated as cloves instead of heads of garlic which saves us hours and made the task to plant easy for the two of us.