Waiting for cooler days to plant more lettuce

When planning what was going to be planted for the fall in late June it did not cross our minds one bit that we possibly could be dealing with triple digit temperatures in October.

The heat wave the last week has meant there is a lot of watering to be done on the farm to keep everything as happy as possible and also postponing any planned plantings until it cooled down.

Most of what we have in the greenhouse is lettuce which is not a big heat lover especially right after being planted so we held off on planting what was ready last week.

It looks like the temperature is cooling off starting today with the high being 89 while yesterday it reached 99 degrees on the farm.

Tomorrow we will have a big planting of in the morning of lettuce and the last few brassicas with the forecast for the next week being much cooler.

Once we plant the brassicas tomorrow we will be done with the majority of fall crops other than lettuce and the last few beds of direct seeding.

The planting season is so condensed in the fall with the days getting shorter and the temperatures cooling off so we need to have everything in the ground early for the winter.

We just started harvesting turnips last weekend and they are looking really good. The tops of the turnips are really big right now and a good addition to a stir fry or any dish that includes a few different greens.

Leeks have also made their way onto the market table for the rest of the fall and winter. It is great to see a good stand of them that have handled the heat of the summer well after being transplanted in May.

All the fall crops we planted in August have been growing well especially the kale, collards, lettuce and arugula. They are growing really quickly with all this warm weather and us giving them lots of water to reduce the stress of the heat.

The first of our green little gem lettuces are being harvested and that means we already are on the third succession of lettuce we planted for the fall. The green and bronze varieties have some differences in them so they are great to mix together in a salad.

Many of the summer crops are significantly slowing down and in the coming weeks we will start to stop harvesting some of them.

There are very few heirloom tomatoes left in the field while the cucumbers and eggplants are slowing down due to all the stress the plants have dealt with all summer. The basil is still going strong but will be done once we have a few days below 50 degrees.

This week we have been pulling up drip tape from some of our summer crops and winter squash so that we are able to mow them before we seed them with a cover crop in the coming weeks.

We will wait until its about to rain to seed the cover crop mix so we don’t have to irrigate with sprinklers and the area thats going to get seeded is much larger than what we can cover with sprinklers.