September Smoke and Sweetness
We were grateful for a very clear-aired summer most of this growing season, but when the smoke arrived this week, it arrived with a vengeance. Combined with a late-summer cold for Mary and Noah (at first hard to distinguish from the smoke cough), and the first heavy frosts arriving on a Friday night, this has been a challenging week for the whole farm crew.
Not so pretty, not fun to breathe. We are glad that the smoke season arrived late, and we hope it clears soon.
As air quality dipped into “hazardous” for part of Thursday morning, many of us tried N95 masks to mitigate the impacts, and we ran into challenges with timing of our wholesale greens harvests, as we had to run extra irrigation shifts to wash ash and fallen cinders off of the leafy greens so they could come clean in our triple-rinse process. These are pretty challenging conditions to work in, but the work of growing food, seasonally, for our community means finding ways to deal with the realities of working outdoors in all the conditions. We’re hoping, as many of you are, for a clearing and cooling trend soon but we will keep at it regardless.
Light is precious for growth this time of year, and a layer of grit and ash on greenhouse plastic is not what plants need. We worry about slow-down of growth in the greens for transplanting to winter tunnels, so we’ll be peeling the shade cloth back off of part of our nursery greenhouse this week. We went from daytime nights near 100 to frosty nights quite quickly this year.
But we are also grateful that the mostly sunny clear summer has left us an incredible abundance of summer-crop produce. With everything going on this past week we did not get an updated bulk-deals reservation form up, but we are harvesting this morning for the farmstore, and can assure you that there will plenty of good stuff in the farmstore all week, and with the member hosting time today we can help pull out bulk quantities of tomatoes, beets, cabbages, and sweet peppers for you. We encourage you to comet to the farmstore during the hosted hours Tuesday (3:00-6:00), or to stop in anytime, to load up. We will have plenty of tomatoes, including whole flats, available to pick up, and we should be able to pull together salsa kits for anyone interested, if you were intrigued by last week’s offer. It’s a great time to walk the farm, too, and watch for some of the seasonal transitions starting to happen. You may notice Tunnel 1 is now empty of cucumber plants, and we are preparing it for the first direct-seeding of winter salad mix, next week. Within the next 2-3 weeks all of those big tunnels will transform, in our continued effort to meet the hunger for fresh local greens in wintertime.
Peppers, peppers, peppers! This entire cartload is flavorful sweet-pepper deliciousness, and the hot peppers are kicking in too. Great time to load up for freezing and processing, or making salsas and sauces.
The melon abundance continues, though we are coasting down from the peak-harvests. Many thanks to all of you who showed up and carted home the big loads of sweetness at our melon sale last week! We are over that particular challenge thanks to you and to a generous sharing of some cooler space from Frost Top Orchard (we are so lucky to have a generous and supportive community of fellow growers of all sorts here in the valley…and the community at large that connects us….we are pretty sure we met Al and Mary at a potluck at a farm member’s home years ago). We will have plenty of melons available today/ this week, but are in less of a panic!
We have had three nights of frost—lightly on Thursday and Saturday of last week, and down to about 28 -30 degrees in the field on Friday night/ Saturday morning. We covered enough that we didn’t lose much that we wanted to keep, and in fact we appreciate this sort of on-time frost (it’s really not early; our average first frost date here is September 1!) as it helps some of our winter greens like chard and kale (visible in the SouthWest corner of the farm as you pull in the driveway), harden up and get prepared for the cold to come. It also burned back a lot of the winter squash leaves just perfectly to help them die back and encourage the fruits to ripen.
The difference a little row cover makes: the zucchini leaf in the foreground was not quite covered by the protective remay layer at the end of the bed, while the rest of the leaves and blossom were protected by the lightweight frost cloth and made it through unscathed. On Friday night, in addition to preparing for market, we covered beans, melons, basil, zucchini, and some flowers to get them through the cold night.
In honor of frosty mornings, our meal suggestions this week do include our favorite roasted tomato soup recipe. We also think there’s no such thing as too many peppers this time of year. We do grow some familiars you’d find anywhere, the red and yellow bell peppers, but mostly we focus on the vastly tastier Italian horn type pepper. Carmen, Escamillo, Cornito Rosso, Cornito Giallio and the much beloved Jimmy Nardello, which we wrote about on our long-ago blog as home gardeners….as many of you have discovered, they are sweet, flavorful, and maybe a little addictive. Slice them into all your salads, sandwiches, burritos, etc., right now, and consider roasting and freezing some for winter too.
Feedbag members, your bags this time of year are high-value and may be getting heavy! Embrace the peak eating season, and remember your farm discount when loading up on extras or taking advantage of some of the bulk deals.
We hope to see you all this week, at the farmstore, at market, or on the Farm to Fork Bike ride this Sunday! Good eating to you all,
Mary and Noah SweetRoot Farm