Rainbow carrots and weeding the farm

A rainbow has emerged on the farm that isn’t like the typical rainbows that only occur after a rainfall and lead to an impossible to find pot of gold.

Our rainbow is also the pot of gold and you have to dig below the carrot tops to find them.

In addition to our delicious orange carrots we are also growing a rainbow mix of carrots that are now ready to be harvested!

We will have the first ones Saturday at the farmers market and they will be loose instead of bunched.

As this was a trial for us we only planted one bed of them so once they are all harvested that will be it until next fall. We attempted to grow them this past spring but the quality of the carrots was not good enough.

With the carrot tops growing tall they have shaded out some of the weeds that try to grow right around the carrots but the weeds in the pathways were unimpeded from growing so we weeded them this week.

Having clean pathways for the carrots and all the other crops allows us to more easily see the defined area where the veggies are and so we don’t accidentally walk over a crop.

Right next to the carrots is the garlic we planted this fall. We have one bed of garlic that was planted much earlier than the others and that is for green garlic which will be exciting to have as it is growing very well now that we weeded it a second time.

The other garlic which we will harvest and cure next May/June we were able to do an initial pass over it with a flame weeder which burst the cells in the weeds without affecting the garlic leaves. The key for that is to do it in the morning on a sunny day so that the weeds die instead of surviving.

We still had to go in and hand weed the garlic but it reduced how much time it took and we were able to use some tools that made the task much quicker.

Having a little bit more time to do other tasks on the farm has been very nice as we’ve been able to do some cleaning up around the farm and organizing our supplies.

We have been pulling up drip tape from our earliest fall lettuces that we have finished harvesting and other fall crops. Those all get put in boxes for that section of the farm so that we have the correct length of drip tape for each bed and don’t have to spend lots of time sorting through it when we need the drip tape.

Since we are almost out of winter squash and garlic we were able to move the pallets they were on out of the barn onto the stack of them and get that area cleaned up so other tools could go there since we’ve added a few more to our collection this fall.