We are directly in the middle of July, yet last week, quite a few conversations were being had about harvest season. 

The conversations mostly started because more pallet boxes, and our new harvesting conveyor arrived. The crew is excited to put both of these to use…but not for a while. We’re all enjoying the warmth and sunshine before the snow and cold inevitably arrive. 

Harvest conversations are a high priority at this time of year because Fall weather is so unpredictable around here. The math has been done over the years to figure out that most plants need to be mature by September 15th in order to have a bountiful fall harvest. The plants will still do a little growing after this date, but it will be minimal and much slower than any growth it would do between now and September. After mid-September, the sun loses a lot of its strength, and daylight starts to decrease quickly. The risk of snow and frost also increases as each day passes. 

This means, from here on out, we can only grow crops that are 60 days to maturity or less. The planting window for a lot of the crops we grow has officially closed. We are hoping to still seed some radishes, lettuce, and maybe radicchio but planting season is pretty much complete.

It’s also important at this time of year to consider if a crop can tolerate frost or not. Zucchini and summer squash tend to have 60 days or less to maturity, but those plants don’t survive very long in temps consistently below 50°, whereas radishes and lettuce do best when grown in cooler weather and can handle a light frost. If the weather is too hot, radishes have a tendency to skip growing the radish root that we eat, and go straight to growing flowers and seed pods. If they do happen to grow a radish, the root can go from decent sized to massive and woody very quickly. Not ideal! Lettuce stays sweeter and more tender in cooler weather. At the peak of summer, lettuce can sometimes become bitter from the heat. 

Thanks to our greenhouses, we can sometimes grow vegetables with a longer maturity. These vegetables take quite a bit of planning. At the end of June, we seeded celery. The intent is to plant it this week in one of our greenhouses, and keep it there until our first Winter CSA boxes go out in November. Celery usually takes about 100 to reach maturity. In the field, the celery wouldn’t size up in time, and the cold weather of October could damage the plant, even though it can survive light frosts. The extra heat and protection from the greenhouse will allow us to keep the celery fresh and beautiful until November.

Feels crazy to talk about frost and the end of the season when we are just beginning to harvest cucumbers, and all of our tomatoes are still green. Thus is farming!

In your box this week:

Our lovely volunteer Patricia shared this recipe with me. It’s so good I had to share it with all of you. It’s a Broccoli salad recipe from Love & Lemons. This salad is sweet, smoky, crunch, and a little tangy. It’s perfect for this hot weather that we’re having. It would be great to accompany a main meal, as a light lunch, or top it with some grilled chicken or shrimp to make it a more filling meal.

I love beets, but every year I get tired of making the same recipes over and over again. Whenever I hit the beet slump, I pull out this recipe for a delicious chocolate cake. The beets and dark chocolate help to make this cake not overly sweet. The chocolate hides the beet color and most of the flavor, so even people who aren’t fans of beets will never know they’re hiding in there.