End of Summer Garden Update

As summer comes to a close things in the garden are looking good. We have had one of the most bountiful harvests in memory. Fall carrots, kale, spinach, lettuce, daikons, turnips, and rutabaga have been or are about to be planted. The high night time temperatures have made seeding difficult, but we have taken advantage of each window of lower than 70 degree nights to get everything in on time.

Work party prepping rows for spinach and kale

The wild lower garden: to the right you can see the okra fruits and to the left is dent corn. In the middle we planted a new cowpea variety for seed (we sell the seeds to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange), it grew unexpectedly well and yet still hasn’t produced flowers.

Ryn, our food processing manager, has devised a new storage solution for this year’s bumper crops. A small room has been insulated and a window A/C unit has been configured with an external monitor to maintain the desired temperature. We estimate that we harvested over a ton of potatoes this year. Fresh potatoes are irresistibly delicious!

Our walk-in refrigerator has been well stocked with watermelons (so many that we have sold quite a few this year), cantaloupe, tomatoes, tomatillos, sweet peppers, hot peppers, eggplant, cucumbers, beets, zucchini, summer squash, and beans of multiple varieties for most of the summer. Major tasks that remain going into fall are the sweet potato harvest and garlic planting. We hope everyone is having as good a year as we are in the garden!

Giant spider we have yet to identify found in the tomato patch

Post written by and photos taken by Sumner