Hello everyone! There was a slight chill in the air when I went outside this morning, and as of 11am the thermometer is only reading 16 degrees. It would seem that fall is in the air! Personally this is my favourite time of the year, not only because of the more agreeable temperatures but also the significant transition in crops that we harvest between summer and fall. However, this year I have been doing a lot less fall crop harvesting as they also happen to be some of the heaviest crops and I'm (Jessie) 35 weeks pregnant. I appreciate all the heavy lifting Raphaëlle and Rebecca are doing!
First of all, a crop that we haven't had much luck with in the past, but it seems like the tide is turning! We have a bumper crop of melons - canteloupes to be exact - this year. We tried two new varieties called Sivan and Iperoine. They grew like weeds! The trickiest part has been to determine when they need to be harvested, as there's nothing worse than an unsweet melon. Over the past week we've been picking a few, letting them ripen on the shelf, then cutting them open. It seems like this last step of letting them ripen off the vine is key.
We've noticed that letting them sit for 2 days seems to be the perfect amount of ripening off the vine, they are incredibly sweet! We will have lots available in the store over the next week. If you aren't sure about eating a whole melon yourself, trying chopping them up and freezing them for flavourful winter smoothies, or dehydrating them (the result is similar to dried mango, super tasty!). We promise they taste nothing like watery grocery store melons!
Other crops that we are harvesting right now are storage onions and squash. Onions are another crop that we haven't had much luck with over the years. Since we moved to this farm we've been plagued with wireworms, a common pest that populates recently transitioned hay fields because they primarily eat grass roots. The wireworms ate their way through our last two crops of onion seedlings, but this year it seems like they found greener pastures (no pun intended). The onions were harvested last week and then left to dry in our greenhouse. They are ready to store when the skins feel papery and the top is dry and sealed off. We won't have a ton of bulk onions for sale, but we'll have 2lb bags.
This year we upped our squash production threefold. There are a lot of squash out in the field! The first variety ready to pick is the delicata squash, which is my personal favourite because it doesn't need to be peeled and is versatile in so many recipes. It is quite sweet and can be chopped into rings and roasted in the oven for a quick side dish.
Finally, another crop that is almost ready to hit the store is our garlic. It has been hanging to dry in our packing shed for about three weeks now. It is ready to clean and store when the skin is papery and the tops have dried out. Every year we sort the harvest into three grades: seed, sale, and seconds. We save the biggest heads with 5-6 cloves/ head for seed to ensure robust seed stock and to maximize the size of heads of the whole crop in future years. We then set aside heads with 3-5 cloves that have no damage for sale. Finally, we save the smallest and sometimes damaged heads for ourselves, as we go through a lot of garlic in the winter! Garlic will store for months in a dry, dark, and cool environment.
I hope you enjoyed this mini-tour through our transition-season crops! We hope you have a smooth transition into the fall season.
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