Rehoboth Homestead

The IMPORTANT item – Thursday folks please let me know whether you want to pick up your share at the farmers market or here.  I will prepack shares for pickup here, with a trade out table as before.  The Plattsburgh Winter Farmers Market is 3 to 6, Thursday, at the Plattsburgh Recreation Center, 52 US Oval on the Old Base.

Hard to have a more gorgeous day.  With potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, in storage, the frantic harvest pace has relaxed a lot.  Today we planted the first 600 feet of garlic (about 1500 cloves), and harvested broccoli, kale, chard, leeks, head lettuce, beets and carrots.  The beets and carrots are waiting until tomorrow morning to be washed while I harvest arugula and salad mixes, probably a few cabbages, and hunt for more tomatoes.  The heirloom tomato plants are hanging on surprisingly well. I pulled the pepper plants before the anticipated frost last week, but have more than an aqua tote of peppers for you.  Take them this week though – when they’re gone, they’re gone.

The carrots are beautiful, 6 to 7 inches and straight.  I love having planted them on hills. Mostly I can pull them, but if needed the digging fork is SOOOO much easier than using it on flat ground.  I can either easily dig from the outside of the hill and the side of soil falls off exposing the sides of the carrots, or dig from the center of the two rows and loosen that one row.  This is definitely a method I will repeat next year.

Beets are small.  I said the Indian Summer is deceptive, and it is.  The warmth is great for plant growth, but they also want many hours of daylight/sunshine.  With the short days, the beets, head lettuce,  and kale are not growing quickly.  The carrots really took off in the last week, but not the beets.

I put in a late planting of delicata squash and babied it along (under row cover for heat, etc).  It paid off, and you can have delicatas this week.

Ya’ll finished off the red potatoes, but we still have some Adirondack Blue.  I have reserved them all for you, not taking them to market.  If there are some left after the CSA ends, they’ll go to market.

If you drive by the field, it looks wonderful.  That is also a little deceptive. I became compulsive about pulling the weeds that were sticking flowers/seeds above the the beets/turnips/carrots so every farmer who drove by could see I had a big weed problem there.  The damage is done in seeds set for next year, but it looks better.  I was surprised by weeds setting seeds in the leeks.  I think I’ve got them under control and don’t pay attention to a crop that is just coasting along, and woops, the weeds have grown.  They aren’t thick in the leeks, but the leeks are in the south field that I have tried so hard to keep weed free (the wind blows seed from the north field in though).

I need to package broilers, so that’s it for tonight.  Have a good week.

Remember, pickup will be at the house. 66 Jabez Allen.

Averages don’t really tell the story in many things.  This year it has been either too wet or too dry.  We are definitely wet enough now for a while.

I’m starting this Saturday night so it gets done.  I just got home from the premiere showing of Small Farms Rising.  This is a “feel good” film about three small, first generation Essex County farms.  It will premiere on Mountain Lake PBS Thursday at 9 p.m., with interviews with the farmers at 8:30 p.m.  I think you’ll enjoy it.

The first batch of sweet potatoes is ready this week.  Sweet potatoes come out of the cool ground starchy. They require a couple weeks of warmth, ideally around 85, to sweeten.  We have about 1/2 of them in the furnace room where it is warm.  I need to move them out and move more from the hoophouse into the warm furnace room to cure.  We had sweet potato tarts from our sweet potatoes at the film premiere today.  No, I don’t have the recipe.  It was a wonderful creation of Generations Restaurant.

Our fall spinach has not done well.  The germination is way off – I finally did a test and it is less than 10%.  So, I am buying in spinach from Fledging Crow for you this week.  We have seeded more of a different variety and it is coming up well, but won’t be ready until November.  Since the spinach usually comes up too thickly, I’ll mix the dead seed in with the good seed to space the plants out some. We do have a small amount from our first seeding that was spotty, but is now full size.  I am very pleased with how we are on schedule with some things, but weeding is falling behind, and that spinach needs weeding.

Speaking of weeding and things doing well.  As we free the late carrot planting from weeds, they look good.  Still small but good. I will pull the larger ones for you this week.  Beets are also growing gangbusters.  I was so pleased to get the potatoes and sweet potatoes dug and in, but am not ready yet to think about harvesting, washing, cutting the tops off, and bagging all those beets and carrots.  Some folks say root crops store better with the dirt left on, but after washing them through last winter, I am trying to get them mostly clean now rather than waiting.  They will need some touch up, but I’d like to get 95% of the dirt off.  The issue is that we don’t want to fill the septic tank with dirt, so things get washed outside in cold water, summer and winter.  The water drains onto the driveway, making an ice slick. If they are 95% clean, I’ll use just a little warm water, and maybe do them in the heated utility room sink. Not complaining, I’ll take the crop, but knowing the work ahead that can be very pleasant or miserable, depending on the weather and time constraints, I am a little apprehensive.

Swiss chard is growing wonderfully.  Remember we have recipes over in the products descriptions on the right.  Swiss chard we like with olive oil, garlic, golden raisins, and sunflower seeds.  I also had a great recipe for stuffed chard leaves from Laurel’s Kitchen.  Had brown rice and cottage cheese among other things.

Head lettuce was looking good.  Hopefully it will not get diseased from this weather.  I glanced at the tomatoes yesterday evening as the mosquitoes drove me in and saw quite a few heirlooms ripening.  I am not hopeful about them though with this weather – I have seem late blight on some of the fruits we have picked ahead.  Late blight loves cool wet weather.  But, we have had a good tomato and pepper year.

Let’s see if I can visualize what I expect this week.  From storage: red & yellow onions, garlic, several types of potatoes, sweet potatoes.  From the field: beets, lettuce, swiss chard, three types of kale, arugula, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, radish, arugula, carrots, sunflowers, maybe salad mixes.

Timing of salad mixes is tricky.  They are quick crops, and how quick is very weather dependent.  I only harvest them for you, so that is once a week.  They go from not tall enough to cut to taller than we’d like within a week.  If we could forecast just how warm it would be each day, I could decide which day to plant them to have them optimum for you, but we can’t.  We had tons of it three days larger than I’d prefer for you last week.  This week it is even larger, or so far too small.  But things can change quickly in warm wet weather.  Tuesday update – hit it perfect this time.

Broccoli and related continue to be spotty.  Apparently this is the case across the northeast.  The northeast wasn’t the hardest hit by weather this year, but I hear reports from across New England and New York from farmers talking about the too wet/too dry/worst insect pests they’ve every had/where did all these crop diseases come from?  Fortunately, though we’ve had definite production problems this year, we have enough diversification in production and markets that we are OK financially (except the pickup truck will cost more than its worth to fix for inspection so there is an unplanned for big expense).

Monday – The chickens are small this week – around 4 pounds.  It has been cold and damp a good bit of their 4 weeks outside, and it shows in their lower weight gain.  They are healthy, but growing more slowly than the earlier batches did.

Hopefully we will miss the showers tomorrow.  Got a lot harvested today, but still need to harvest lettuce, tomatoes, and kale.

Have a great week.

It was a really hot high of 76 today. Since the 1000 strawberry plants I was expecting last week aren’t being shipped until tomorrow, I hope the heat keeps up.  It will also help the cover crops get good root systems for the winter.

We focused on finishing harvesting potatoes so I can plant winter cover crops. I can’t really tell you what to expect tomorrow.  I did notice that the snap beans have held up so you can pick them again this week.

I did take some photos last week.  I have repeatedly explained how squash bugs and cucumber beetles have decimated the squash family.

The plants were trying their best, but the beetles kept eating the skin of the cucumbers.

There are LOTS of squash bugs.

The black dots are flea beetles on Napa cabbage.

From recent experience, I expect we will have a full table tomorrow.

The rain gave me a bit of a break today.  Tony and friends butchered this morning bright and early. The broilers this week are 4 1/2 to 5 pounds.  We have smaller (3+ lb) female ducklings and one larger male (5+ lbs) plus duck breasts and legs.  Also have some fresh chicken breasts, legs, and livers.

Because of the rain we stayed out of the field today.  Instead we washed potatoes and got them into apple crates in the walk-in cooler, sorted tomatoes in the garage and hoophouse, threw out some old stuff that had been stacked after farmers markets and forgotten, cleaned up onions and garlic, weeded hoophouse, cleaned up work area in hoophouse, etc.  The weather was just downright relaxing. I even got some phone calls made (arranging to borrow mulch layer to plant strawberries, ordering cover crop seed, etc).  I have a chicken and variety of potatoes in the oven for a late dinner tonight – first time all summer we’ve had a roast chicken.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, it is only 9 p.m. and I am getting to writing this.  Usually it is 11 or so before I get the birds packed and weighed, but I got it done almost before dark.

Tomorrow will be interesting.  Keeping boots on (the mud likes to hold on to them) and staying upright will be a challenge.  I expect we’ll start in the areas where I have ground cloth down between the rows – field tomatoes, peppers, parsley, chard, statice, sunflowers, what is left of squash.  Also may have a helper tear more tomato plants out of the hoophouse to make room for fall seedings, just to keep them out of the mud a little.  I expect to have onions, garlic, and potatoes (already harvested and cleaned).  We are almost done with potatoes.  We have white, gold, red with white centers, purple with gold centers, blue with purple centers, red and white fingerlings, a European small potato, etc.  With the time crunch from not harvesting some stuff today, I don’t know that I will many varieties down for you this week – it may be standards. I found more sweet onions today so you will have what I expect to be the last of them tomorrow. To harvest in the morning, in addition to what is accessible with ground cloth – kales, broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, lettuce, beets.  Green beans will be u-pick.  They really need to be picked, and probably have some spots molding from the dampness since they were laid down by Irene.  I have managed to get the field tomatoes sprayed with copper hydroxide before the rain, spinach and salad mixes planted, etc, most potatoes dug. These took priority over harvesting beans Friday, Saturday after market, and Sunday morning before church.  I need to water some fish fertilizer in on the basil – it is showing nutrient stress, and we will have little if any tomorrow (but we did have absolutely gorgeous basil for soooo long, that I am satisfied).

The drive/parking area held up fine last week.  I took saw horses down last week to block the north drive if needed, and will do again tomorrow if it gets slippery.