We’re doing our best in the mud and the rain, lethargically slithering through the rot and the veggie guts like chilled garter snakes. Our coolest morning so far this fall was a relatively mild 43 degrees, and so we continue to pick tomatoes, peppers and even the occasional summer squash—although these frost-sensitive crops have greatly slowed in their production. Three cheers for the farmers this morning who made beautiful veggie bunches for chefs despite having cold hands and feet!
Last Tuesday’s soaking rain meant that we couldn’t dig sweet potatoes on Thursday when volunteer groups visited the fields. Instead, morning volunteers from Wellpet’s corporate office pulled weeds from the perennial garden (pictured below; that’s a mountain of weeds in the bed of the truck behind them), before harvesting tomatoes and peppers.
Wellpet Volunteers
In the afternoon, volunteers from National Grid’s legal team harvested eggplant and potatoes (from a field with lighter soil), before clipping and shucking popcorn for drying. All that wonderful help made for a more relaxed Friday market harvest, and we even had time to wash lots of pumpkins and ornamental gourds in anticipation of a busy weekend. Many thanks to the admissions staff and the stand volunteers who did a fantastic job selling so much produce on Saturday and Sunday to an incredible number of visitors—over 1,000 on Saturday alone!
Harvesting difficult sweet potatoes
On that busy Saturday, we finally began the penultimate harvesting odyssey of the season—14 beds of sweet potatoes. The last will be potatoes, and compared to spuds, sweet potatoes are much more difficult to extract from the soil because several vines emanate in all directions from each initial transplant, and as these vines creep along the ground, they root in multiple spots like strawberry runners on steroids. Underneath the leaf canopy, the entire field becomes a fibrous woven mat. In mowing down the leaves to clear the way for harvesting, we try to grind down some of the vines as well, but there is the danger of hitting the potatoes, which are often just below, or even protruding above the soil surface. The remnant vines often get tangled in the harvest bar as we try to undercut the roots. Even after we’ve loosened the bed, we still have to wrestle with the vines and saturated soil as we search for sweet potatoes across the entire five-foot width of the bed. The digging is hard on the hands and forearms, and so we were grateful when volunteers from the Cambridge School of Weston and Boston Trinity Academy teamed-up to help us harvest 500 pounds of sweet potatoes on Saturday (pictured above). Two beds down, twelve to go. Many thanks to all who helped that day!
See you in the field.
Your Farmers