A light frost and more lettuce being planted this week

When the sun rose over the farm on Friday the veggies were all still waking up from the frost they got over night.

It is a gorgeous sight to see lightly frosted veggies in the field on a late November day showing the change in season to now being a likelihood of frost and even freezes for the next few months.

Friday is a big harvest day for us and we had to wait until there was no more frost to harvest the veggies.

Harvesting leafy greens when they are frosted can cause some issues that make them go bad quickly so the wait was needed even though there was not much we could do on the farm at that time.

The clay soils held lots of the water from the rain which then frosted when the temperatures on the farm dropped below 36 degrees Fahrenheit.

Having had sun for the last week the soil had dried out enough that we are able to plant the lettuce and spinach we have in the greenhouse. We were planning to plant them the week we got all the rain but had to postpone it until now.

This is pretty late to be planting lettuce as it will take much longer to grow but they are hardy enough to handle most of the cold weather we expect to get. If it gets really cold we will cover them with our cloth row cover we have.

The rain also pushed back a lot of needed weeding which we have been working on this week to catch back up. Many of the weeds are grasses which take much more time to weed and the tools we have don’t get rid of them like other types of weeds.

The larger plants can handle a few small weeds easy but the direct seeded crops like carrots and beets need the help getting rid of those weeds so that they can focus all their energy on growing.

We recently got a Brix refractometer that measures the sugar percentage in a liquid to test the sugar levels of some of the citrus we are leasing. They are starting to change colors so we have been testing the citrus.

The first of the varieties are close to starting harvest and tomorrow we are going to test their sugar levels along with tasting the to see how much flavor they have.

Having this tool to measure sugar we also tested the Fuyu persimmons with it. The test confirmed our taste tests of how sweet and delicious they are with a reading of 20% sugar.

Sugar is not everything in fruit as it needs a balance with acid to make it taste good. It is a helpful indicator to gauge ripeness.

In addition to planting and weeding, we have been back at the olive grove picking more olives this week. Every time we are there harvesting we are learning more about the trees and seeing the different characteristics of each variety.

The olives are continuing to ripen on the tress and hopefully in the next few weeks we will harvest the rest of the olives.