Wrapping up summer crops as 2025 garlic emerges

Now that it is the middle of October the first few summer crops are on their last legs and this will be the last week of harvesting them.

Saturday will be the last chance to get some summer squash and okra from us until next May or June.

Having gone through the stresses of the summer and being harvested six days of the week along with the heatwaves there have been the summer squash plants are very tired and only a handful of them are still producing any flowers.

This has been the best okra plants we have had in three years and some of them are over eight feet tall, which is only half the height of the Guinness World Record okra plant. All the leaves have dropped off the plants and the fewer hours of daylight means they are not producing any more pods.

We still have some tomatoes, basil, eggplants, cucumbers and peppers but those are dwindling and will be done for the year in the next few weeks.

Many of our fall veggies we have already started to harvest and this week we are starting to harvest some radishes.

Two weeks ago we planted some cloves of garlic in the ground that we wil be harvesting for green garlic in early 2025 and many of them have already pushed their first green stalks out of the ground.

It is quicker than we thought and that is due to the warm temperatures we have had at the start of October.

Garlic can be a particularly challenging crop to weed as it doesn’t shade out the weeds even when it is mature so to get ahead on it we flame weeded it to knock back the first weeds that are germinating. Garlic can handle the intensity of the flame weeding for a second so as long as we don’t stay in one spot for long it won’t be damaged.

After a nice hand weeding and irrigating the beets and carrots have been growing really well. The tops of them have doubled which has helped them photosynthesize more and start to produce the roots of the plants so hopefully we will begin harvesting them in a couple of weeks.

While many tasks on the farm related to the veggies will be slowing down over the net month as everything grows much slower we’ve been working on some non-veggie crops to add to the table during the winter.

Once we get a little closer to when we are starting to harvest them we will share the exciting news in detail of the bounty we will be offering at the farmers market to complement the veggies.

We’ve been working on getting all the documents in order so that once they are ready to harvest we can just focus on that and don’t have to wait until the paperwork is done.