The end of spring veggies and planing for fall veggies

The harvest is continuing to get bigger every week of our summer veggies with new ones coming each week but we are needing to save some of our attention to planning what we are growing this fall and winter.

Planning for what is being seeding beginning in about four weeks is occurring at the same time as many of our spring veggies are wrapping up this week.

This week will be the last harvest of carrots, bunching greens and broccoli until the fall along with other crops like lettuce that we picked the last of this past week.

All of those veggies are ones that we are going to be growing in the fall and even though growing them in the fall and winter is different, we can learn from how they did this spring to determine aspects of our planning.

We don’t plan the entire year out at one time since there can be lots of changes happening depending on how a crop grows and sells in the spring that affect how much of it we want to grow in the fall.

Over time our list of priority veggies in each season changes so we adjust how much of each we are growing and at what time in the season would we like to have a lot ready to harvest.

Having the knowledge of the past two winters and how the veggies grew in very different types of winters we are able to get a better idea of what we need to plant.

As the days get cooler and shorter in the fall everything grows slower so we need to be planting lots more to get them to be growing enough before they practically stop growing from late December to late January.

In the spring we seed lettuce in the greenhouse every other week while in the fall we are going to be seeding it every week.

With the condensed time to seed everything for the fall and winter there is a lot of time needed to be spent in the greenhouse seeding at the same time as we are still in the main part of our summer veggie harvest.

Hopefully we will be able to reduce the time we spend seeding with the vacuum seeder that we just got which can seed a tray in seconds compared to a few minutes it takes us by hand.

The tomatoes have taken the spotlight on the farm this June as the summer crop everyone wants to talk about and deservedly so but all the summer veggies are loving the weather.

The cucumbers, potatoes, basil and summer squash are perfect for any summer veggie dish on their own or to complement some tomatoes.

We’ve been harvesting shishito peppers for the past two weeks and are eagerly anticipating all the other varieties of peppers. The plants are all filled with green fruits of each of the varieties that we are waiting to ripen and change color so they become delicious.