Collards, spinach, lettuce, carrots, leeks, celery, sweet peppers, tomatoes. It’s also possible we’ll have some arugula and chard. The greens are all a bit ahead of schedule with the warm weather we’ve been having which is speeding things up. Part of the trickiness this time of year is that so many things are ready to be harvested, but we have to pick and choose a little and guess a bit at what will hold for the coming harvests later this fall. We’re also continuing to see pretty decent sweet peppers and tomatoes but with the reduced day lengths and cooler nights this may be the last good harvests of those.
There’s been a lot of excitement about radicchio with the release of the new Radicchio book from our good friends Lane Selman, Margarett Waterbury and Shawn Linehan. It’s a beautiful book, full of great photos, and if you’re really eagle eyed you may recognize one shot that was taken at our farm. Radicchio has the best flavor when the nights are cold and we plan the first harvests for the beginning of November. It looks like our early plantings are probably right on schedule, but we may have a few early ones on the farm stand in a couple of weeks. Escarole, another crop in the chicory genus like radicchio, looks like it’ll be ready for week 3, right on schedule.
The weather is making it a little easier for us to get cover crops planted, and to continue knocking back the weeds. We’re also going to plant a few overwintering crops for next spring and summer harvests in the next week or two and the weather looks good for that too. Once those are in the ground we look forward to the return of the rain and an end to irrigation season.
