Planting & Weeding for the Fall

It is starting to look a little like fall on the farm with so many veggies planted in the last few weeks.

The amount of space on the farm that has seeds or plants in it has doubles since the middle of August and that means a lot more work for us.

Getting those plants and seeds in early is crucial so that they can grow fast enough early on and are able to be ready to harvest in the much cooler weather we will have in a few months.

All these fall veggies are needing more water than they would typically need in more fall-like conditions because if they get stresses out now they could go to seed before they are ready to harvest.

And we don’t have the ability to plant something else that will be ready at the same time so we would have a gap for a crop we didn’t want to have. That’s not the end of the world but our goal is to have consistency in many veggies all the times so that we have them on our market stall every week.

For a few of the veggies we also need to have consistency so that we can sell them wholesale because it is easier to sell through that channel when the buyers know you will have something all the time and can plan for it.

Obviously the best laid plans don’t ever work out and we already have had some crop failures but we are trying our best to fill in those crops as quickly as possible. We just transplanted some kale where we had previously had our first planting this fall do poorly for the most part.

There are a decent amount of plants there that are growing well but definitely not enough to have all that we need weekly for market so these new transplants should help that out a little later.

For some of the veggies like lettuce we hope these early plantings only need one weeding before they are ready to harvest. They are growing pretty fast and the more leaves they have the more they will grow even with the days being shorter.

Getting those weeds out of the way for the veggies to grow is crucial while there is still lots of warm days and sunlight.

There is a definite lower amount of daylight than a month ago but fortunately we are still getting lots of sunlight which is keeping the photosynthesis higher than in the spring when it was cloudy often.