Slowing down on the farm

Farming with head lamps is not something we want to be doing so with the sunset coming earlier every day there is less time we are spending working on the farm.

Additionally right after sunrise is the coldest time of the day so unless we need to be doing a task on the farm we prefer to wait a little bit.

Fortunately the work in the field has slowed down by a good amount and some of it has been replaced with office work preparing for 2024.

Winter Solstice is in just over a week and that day has the lowest amount of daylight of the year. After that we will see the amount of daylight slowly start to increase. The plants will benefit from it but not too much as the cold weather hinders it.

We will be at the farmers market for the next two weeks but after the 23rd we will be taking a break from market for the last week of December and all of January.

Of course we won’t be lacking work as all of January we will be seeding so many crops for the spring and summer.

Over the last week we’ve got the coldest we have been so far on the farm this fall. On Friday morning when harvesting kale for the market there was little pieces of ice on the leaves. That was there from the fifth of an inch we got Wednesday and Thursday which then froze Friday morning.

Since then we’ve had a few more days just above freezing and fortunately have yet to see any damage on our veggies from it. Most of them handle temperatures into the 20s pretty well like the brassicas but the lettuce and arugula can sometimes get damage at temperatures around freezing.

The key with them, and for every crop, is to have strong plants before they have to deal with a stressful weather event like temperatures near freezing or extremely hot weather in the summer. Once a plant becomes stressed it will be susceptible to diseases, pests and will likely not grow as well as it can.

With working less on the farm we have been focusing more on planning what we are growing for the upcoming spring and summer. We are almost done with it, just a few more decisions to be made and then we will be ordering all of our seeds.

It is very exciting to look ahead to what we are planning to grow and being able to harvest everything. Most of what we are growing is staying the same with just a few additions of fun and delicious crops to the market table next year.