More fall veggies ready to harvest

It is so much fun to see almost all the fall veggies that we grow begin to be harvested while we are still harvesting a decent amount of our summer veggies.

The crossover of the summer and fall veggies makes for some great food combinations which will only be added to with the start of harvesting leeks and beets on the farm.

Leeks are one of the longest growing crops on the farm with us starting the seeds in the greenhouse at the end of January. We then transplanted them in April and have been watering and weeding them since them.

We could have started harvesting them a few weeks ago but we wanted them to size up a little bit more and now they are fabulous.

Beets are the other crop that we are starting to harvest this week. The greens on the beets have been looking fantastic and now the roots are sizing up. We’ll have a mixture of the round red beets and the cylindrical beets at market.

Our other main root veggie, carrot is still a few weeks away but we are starting to see tiny carrots below the ground. We direct seeded them just under two months ago and if they had perfect conditions they might have been ready to harvest now but a little more waiting has to be had.

Due to the warm weather when we plant our first lettuce in the fall we don’t plant any red butter lettuce in the beginning since it doesn’t do as well with the heat. We waited a couple of successions to plant the first red butter of the fall and now we are starting to harvest the first ones.

Many of our summer crops are slowing down in how much we are harvesting from a month ago. They are not liking the cool temperatures we’ve had mixed in with warm day recently and are ripening much slower.

Additionally there is less sunlight every day which is slowing them down while the fall veggies don’t need as much sunlight to grow.

This recent warm weather has helped the weeds grow just as fast as the veggies with us giving the fall veggies lots of water. Getting all the veggies weeded has been a focus of ours and will continue to be every day we are farming organically.

Next week we will be bringing winter squash to the market for the first time this year. We have limited quantities of all three varieties especially the Honeynut.