This Saturday is the premier event of the fall season — the Garlic Planting Party! Starting at 1:00 and going until we are done we will provide unlimited entertainment having you help us plant garlic! It is a great event to get to know your farm, farmers and other members of the farm. Plus you might even learn something! Plenty of fresh air and sunshine will be supplied. There are tasks for all ages and abilities. If you can help us out we would be immensely appreciative. Please let me know if you can make it so I can plan accordingly.
We are starting to give out WinterShares. If you ordered a WinterShare please look for it at your pick-up location. This week we are giving out the shallots, garlic and onions.
FlowerShare this week is decorative gourds.
Four weeks of the season left. Please plan accordingly.
This week’s top story
This past week is the one week of the season that is “special” and not necessarily in a good way. Why last week you ask? Because we had a frost. The first frost of the season. For those who are warm blooded creatures you may not be aware that not everything can live through a frost. In the plant kingdom — and specifically the vegetable plant kingdom — we categorize plants into two different categories: those that survive frost and those that don’t. The former we call cool season plants. The later we call warm season plants. So when we have a frost we have to change our usual plans to take care of the warm season plants.
This year we were lucky that the weather forecasters gave us plenty of notice. Actually they didn’t but we’ve learned over the years that there are certain “clues” the forecasters give that give us notice. For example, the prior week the National Weather Service was forecasting low temps right around 40 degrees. Each day the forecast seemed to lower the future low temperature. By Saturday the forecast had a low around 37. They still had not indicated there would be a frost but by Sunday if I recall they finally announced there is potential for spotty frost on Tuesday night. Eventually they changed to widespread frost. So by Monday morning we were pretty confident we needed to switch to frost mode.
We first need to determine how many nights the frost will last. We make different decisions based on the length of the cold spell. If we have a long cold spell ahead we will assume every warm season plant is a goner and harvest everything from these plants worth harvesting. If instead the cold snap is for a night or two we will implement solutions that try to protect the warm season plants for those few nights thus allowing them to continue to grow and produce after the cold snap ends. Last week’s forecast had one night of frost followed by warming temps and generally warm weather so we were in plant protection mode.
Some plants like beans are warm season crops but don’t necessarily keep producing. Others like peppers keep producing fruits until they die. So we treat each type of plant a bit differently. This year, since we’ve had a great bean year, we decided to harvest as many of the remaining beans as we could and let the plants perish in the frost. In the past when the frost came earlier in September we have covered the beans with floating row covers — an extra long, very thin blanket — to give them a bit of protection allowing them to survive and us the opportunity to keep picking them. But this year it just wasn’t worth the effort. This is also true with tomatoes and cherry tomatoes. The effort to save the plants was greater than the future productivity of the plants.
On the other hand, plants like peppers, eggplants and tomatillos keep producing until they die. The plants still have many fruits at various degrees of maturity. So our goal with these plants is to pick as we normally would and then setup a solution to keep the plants alive until there is no more frost. For these three plant groups we turn our overhead sprinklers on the plants to keep them from freezing. Though the temperature is low enough to cause the water to freeze, the process of freezing releases energy some of which is absorbed by the plants thus keeping the plants above the temperature at which they would freeze and die. Pretty cool huh?
The cool season plants typically survive the first frost of the season. They are less susceptible to their cells freezing and bursting thus causing them to die. However they still seem to be negatively affected by the cold, I suspect because it comes on a bit too quickly and doesn’t allow the plant to acclimate. So though our broccoli, cabbage and kale have survived, some of the leaves got a bit scorched.
Some plants actually improve after a frost. In particular, carrots become sweeter after they’d experienced a few frosts (but surprisingly not this week’s carrots. They seem better suited for cooking). Carrots are biennials — plants that grow the first season then create their reproductive bodies the second. So biennials need a way to survive the winter and they do so by storing carbohydrates (sweet, delicious sugars!) in their roots. When they experience a frost they realize the growing season is coming to an end sometime soon so they start storing the carbs in their roots thus making the roots sweeter. Now there is still the nature — as opposed to the nurture — part of the plant-raising equation so just giving them a few frosts won’t turn a ho-hum carrot into a deliciously sweet carrot but the frost will make it more sweet.
Finally, sweet potatoes are somewhat unique (can something be only somewhat unique?) in that even though they grow underground and you’d expect the roots would survive the frost even if the vines died, a frost that kills the vines can negatively affect the roots. So we try to harvest them before the frost then cure them over a few weeks to heal their wounds and sweeten them up a bit. Unfortunately due to the extensive deer grazing we didn’t get a very good yield on our sweet potatoes this season. We need to solve the deer situation next season. I don’t know if there is a solution since whenever we implement a barrier on the most susceptible plants they just switch to other plants where there isn’t a barrier. Anyway, enough about the damn deer.
So last week was a lot of extra work that we had to do before we got the frost. It looks like we’ll have a few days of warm weather this week then a cold snap which could spell the end for those last few warm season crops we protected — including the hoop house tomatoes if the temps get too low.
By the way, just so people know that while these forecasters were pretty good at predicting the Tuesday night frost they were woefully inadequate — as they typically are — in predicting the Wednesday night frost. The forecast for Wednesday night was 40 degrees with no frost — at least by the time I went to bed at 11:00. When I awoke at 5:30 I checked the temp and it was 37. I went out to turn on the sprinklers then walked down the row to ensure they were all spinning. The first three were fine but the fourth and fifth were frozen with no water coming out. Due to this lack of frost protection we unfortunately lost some of the leaves on some of the peppers, eggplants and tomatillos. The plants survived so we will get the fruit off the plants this week before it frosts again but it was frustrating to put in the effort to protect the plants on Tuesday night only to lose some of them when the forecast was so far off Wednesday night.
What will we have this week?
Winter squash, carrots, potatoes, leeks, lemongrass, garlic, peppers, some broccoli, some tomatillos, some tomatoes, hot peppers, some arugula (going out in the boxes this week), some radishes, and of course the things I tend to forget.
We have ‘ShroomShare and FlowerShare this week. We will also start giving out parts of WinterShare — garlic, shallots and onions are ready to give out. FlowerShare is ornamental gourds.
Answer to last week’s brain teaser
To refresh your memory, here is last week’s brain teaser: Say you have a 10 lb watermelon that is 90% water. You want to dehydrate it down so that it is now 50% water. How much would the dehydrated watermelon now weigh?
This must have been too easy for most of you since very few actually submitted an answer. Either that or nobody makes it to the end of the newsletter. Anyway, the answer is 2 lbs. How do you figure farmer Chris? Easy. If a 10 lb watermelon is 90% water, 9 lbs of the melon would be water and the other 1 lb would be not-water. So if we take this 1 lb of not water and add 1 lb of water it would be 50% water — which is what we wanted — and weigh 2 lbs. Seems so simple!
Here is this week’s brain teaser
Since earlier in this newsletter I mentioned using the heat given off by freezing water to keep our plants warm can we use the reverse — the melting of water — to our advantage as well? Sure! Let’s say you are trying to lose weight — somewhere around 10 lbs. And want to do so by just eating ice leaving everything else in your life exactly the same. Same amount of exercise, same amount of food calories. Everything, just eating more ice. First, will this work? And second, how much ice would you need to eat to lose 10 lbs of fat?
As always, do not hesitate to contact me with questions, comments, suggestions, answers to this week’s brain teaser and RSVPs to the garlic planting party!