Goings on on the Farm

Yes, it is still raining. Returning from a meeting about the Organic Farming Conference at the MOSES office in Spring Valley, Wisconsin, daughter Isabel and I got caught in a Winona downpour that completely missed the farm, for which I felt grateful. And then another inch dropped on the farm in the middle of the night, replete with that sort of lightning that feels more like a flickering fluorescent light bulb than individual flashes, and a thundering background that drowns out any other noises.

Of course, things turned hot and muggy this week, as I think everybody in the Midwest noticed. Really hot and really muggy by Wednesday afternoon, so that the rain falling on asphalt seemed almost to sizzle.

We took advantage of a dry early part of the week to kill more weeds, trellis the outdoor crop of tomatoes, and push through the bulk of our harvest work. In the greenhouse, we’ve got some sickliness in the cucumbers, but the Sungolds are producing a bountiful crop. Chris seeded the storage crop of beets down on the rental ground on Saturday afternoon, along with the normal round of salad greens and quick herbs. In the transplant house, we started the fall cropping cycle of Italian greens.

On Monday we harvested a nice crop of garlic. We’ve been harvesting green garlic for quite a few weeks now, but this will be the crop that we cure for long-term storage. We decided to try something new with the cleaning and curing of the crop this year. In the past, we have hung the garlic in the barn to cure, but this year we decided to place the garlic in bins and hook the bins up to our greenhouse heater, which has a large, forceful fan on it. This allows us to run slightly warmer and drier air over the garlic, drying out the outer layers and sealing up the pores for long storage; keeping it out of the barn keeps it out of reach of birds and other sources of potential contamination.