We woke on Saturday morning to the hardest first frost we’ve seen in years. Temperatures down in the valley dipped below 28 degrees, and that was eight feet off the ground. Fortunately, few of our frost-tender crops live in the valley. Up on the ridge, the peppers and beans suffered plenty of damage to their leaves, but the fruits were undamaged and still harvestable. The winter squash, which was growing on a west-facing ridge, had frost on the fruits, but for the most part it wasn’t so severe as to damage the crop. And frosting off the vine-y leaves made it much easier to harvest on Monday afternoon.
Which is what we did. On Monday afternoon, Kim, Chris, and Lucas cut and piled the winter squash. We consider squash harvest to be a high-skill undertaking, and we take great pride in providing only the ripest winter squash (see In Kim’s Kitchen for a description of how to pick a ripe squash). We finished three quarters of the picking on Monday afternoon, and pulled more than 300 bushels of squash out of the field on Tuesday morning using our large tractor with pallet forks on the loader and big, 20-bushel wooden bins. We’ll finish the harvest next week.
On Wednesday morning, we harvested the celeriac crop, the first of our root crops for storage. We aren’t going to have a great roots year this year, but the celeriac was great, with yields up by over a third from last year in the same amount of space. This is one crop that made the most of the late-August flooding, since it loves extra water when it’s sizing up, and August’s wet weather really made the most of it. Go celeriac!
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