Starting to put summer crops to bed

It finally feels like fall is here to stay. The temperatures are not climbing into the 80s and mostly will be in the high 60s and low 70s for the next week.

That means the end of our summer crops is here this week and we will have to mow them down in the coming days with the forecasted rain next week.

The forecast shows that next Tuesday through Saturday we will be getting a decent amount of rain that may not let us get into the field with our tractor afterwards for a few days and who knows there may be more rain after that.

Our last tomato harvest was this past week and we finished basil harvest a few weeks ago.

This week will be the last week we harvest the eggplants and peppers. The plants have a few ripe ones left on them and after we have them they will be barren since the plants are not looking that great.

Before we are able to mow down these crops there are a number of steps that we have to complete.

First we have to pull up the drip tape that we have for every row of these veggies since we want to reuse the drip tape and don’t want it to mowed in with the plants.

After the drip tape is removed we are able to mow the peppers, eggplant and basil but for the tomatoes there are a few more steps we need to do.

Since we trellis the tomatoes we have to cut down the string that holds the plants upright and then we will pull out the tomato stakes.

We don’t have an exact number on how many stakes there are in the field but approximately there are 360 at least.

Once those tasks are done we will mow down the green matter and along with our other fields that won’t have any crops in them over winter we will seed them with a cover crop mixture.

While our summer crops are looking pretty sad our fall crops are growing amazingly and it has been such a joy harvesting them.

The broccoli plants are the best ones we’ve grown so far and are producing some gorgeous heads of broccoli that we hopefully will have consistently at market.

We are just starting to harvest some of our cabbage while we have a new planting of radishes and turnips that will be harvested beginning this week. All of our bunching greens are looking very strong after an early fall hiccup and we even have another succession of them thats growing well to help there be a consistent amount for us to harvest even as everything grows slower in the winter.