Crops Update: Oh Deer!

We spotted three new fawns running out of the fields this morning, bringing to 13 the number of individual deer we’ve counted out there. Our two solar chargers and electric fence set-ups are deployed around carrot patches, and, so far, have been effective. We continue to set up twine fences around ever more crops, three beds at a time—that’s the largest area we can effectively protect without electrification; go larger and the deer just hop right in—, but we only seem to be pushing them onto new crops. Deer are now eating cilantro, radish, bachelor buttons, and next year’s strawberry crop. Even after last weekend’s frost killed the sweet potato vines, we sprayed the beds with repellant just to keep the deer from pawing up the roots over the few days it would take to get them out of the ground. We got a jump on that big job thanks to the helpful work of volunteers from Enterprise Holdings. On Tuesday of last week, seven Enterprise volunteers worked with part of the Crops Team to dig over 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes, while another seven helped us harvest, shuck, and trim this year’s popcorn crop. Thank you, Enterprise!

We  finished the sweet potato harvest over the next two days with help from community volunteers. And on Friday, more community volunteers helped us do a final sweep through the tomato, pepper and eggplant patches looking for any last fruit that had escaped the frost. By Saturday, we were cutting down tomato twine in preparation for extracting the hundreds of stakes we pounded in June and July. That day, we also began harvesting storage potatoes into the root cellar.

On Sunday afternoon, volunteer Kate from the Appalachian Mountain Club brought another awesome group of ten hikers to the field, and they cut down the rest of the tomato twine and dug 600 pounds of potatoes. Many thanks to Kate and the AMC! Volunteers from Concord Open Table arrived on Sunday afternoon for the second of their weekly pickups, and they took away lots of greens and winter squash. Jill has been doing a great job tracking our food donations to Food for Free, Concord Open Table and the Lincoln Food Pantry. She let the team know that last week we passed our $50,000 target for donated produce. Nice to start the Friday harvest with good news like that! Our thanks to all who are contributing to Drumlin’s efforts to feed those in need through the pandemic.

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Crops Update: First Frost of the Season

This phone camera is as beat as these plants. If you can make it out through the impressionistic haze, that’s our frozen tomato patch on the left and two burned-up bean beds on the right. We noticed the first frost damage of the year on husk cherries and purslane weeds on the morning of 9/15, and have had several freezes since then. Remember, the last frost of the spring killed half our sweet potato patch on the morning of 6/2. That means we had a total of only 104 frost-free growing days this season! The Crops team and volunteers worked throughout last week with an awareness of the looming cold, and did a great job maximizing the final tomato, pepper, flower and string bean harvests of the year.

On Friday afternoon, volunteers from Definitive Healthcare (the first corporate group of the year!) picked 80 pounds of beans and 90 pounds of cherry tomatoes. They’ve been working remotely throughout the pandemic, and this was their first opportunity to be together outside of Zoom meetings. You can see them picking away and then proudly standing behind their bean harvest, while in the background of both pictures, notice volunteer Anne, intent on the job at hand—saving more beans! While this group worked in the front field, a separate group of community volunteers thoroughly picked through the main tomato patch and another planting of beans. And then, for the second week in a row, a large, fresh wave of volunteers arrived at 4 p.m. to cut flower stems. All told, Drumlin had about 30 people harvesting that day–right before the killing frost!

And so, we made the most of the summer. To all who have been helping, whether it be by greeting volunteers in the parking lot, pulling weeds in the field, seeding trays in the greenhouse, harvesting crops, boxing CSA shares, paying bills, mucking barns and making compost, fixing broken things, ordering supplies, and/or, at the other end of the process, buying the farm’s food, take a moment to reflect on the delicious bounty the earth produced all summer, and to appreciate the role you played in that. Thank you!

By the end of this week, we plan to begin filling the root cellar with storage potatoes. Before that, we need to dig all the sweet potatoes that survived the June frost. Now that the September frost has burned away the vines, the deer have easy access to the tubers, and they will dig down with their hooves. Root harvests have been made easier by the lack of rain; it’s as if everything is buried in sand and lifts right out. We would trade that ease for the water the storage carrots and cabbage really need right now. It hasn’t rained since 9/11, and there are so few days left for crops to put on size!

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Crops Update: Preparing for Frost

If not tonight, then by the weekend, we’re expecting the first light frost of the season. We take the forecasted low and subtract ten to account for the farm’s frost pocket. This means that in the week ahead it’s all hands on deck for what may be the closing bean, pepper, eggplant, summer squash and tomato harvests of the year. And while there is a mountain of work to get through this week, the Crops team has one less farmer, as Jen finished her season with us this past Friday. Jen accepted a job helping underserved communities in the Berkshires access public transportation. We will miss her steady presence on the team and wish her all the best. Given that, we’re really looking forward to having the help of our first corporate volunteer groups of the season later in the week, and we’re hoping to see some of our committed community volunteers on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon to help with these important harvests. Last Friday afternoon, we had wonderful volunteer help throughout the tomato and bean harvest, and then some people stayed, while even more arrived, for a total of nine volunteers on the evening flower harvest. Their good work helped us reach a season’s high in flower sales at Saturday’s market. Below you can see volunteer Nancy surrounded by a portion of that enormous flower harvest at Drumlin’s farmstand on Saturday morning.  

While Nancy was making bouquets to order for farm visitors, seven more volunteers fanned out across the acorn squash patch and helped us bring them in before the arrival of another cool evening. Temperatures below 50 can cause chilling injury to squash and pumpkins, so it felt good to get the very last of this year’s crop into the greenhouse just in time. Acorn squash will be in this week’s CSA share, along with peppers, tomatoes, and some really nice carrots you can see lined-up below. We need to cut the tops off the carrots since we’ve sprayed the ferns with repellant to keep the deer away, and lining them up helps speed that process. The twine fence you see around the carrot patch is an added measure of protection against the ten deer we’re seeing on a regular basis in the field (4 does, 6 bucks).  

One crop family the Drumlin deer leave alone is brassicas—broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, etc. Turkeys will occasionally eat brassica leaves, but its main pests are cabbage loopers and aphids. We spray organically certified bacterias to help control loopers, and for aphids, we seed cilantro in the patches and let it flower. The white flowers attract insects that also eat aphids. The flowering cilantro is taller than the already tall Brussels sprouts (we seeded the cilantro in the same week we transplanted the Brussels). On the soil you can see the top growth of the plants that we’ve just cut away to encourage the sizing-up of the sprouts—it’s like removing the garlic scape to boost bulb size. With this one bed of sprouts, we’re about two weeks too late with topping. But we’ll be able to compare sprout size in this bed with three others we topped earlier in the season.

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Crops Update: Thank You’s from a Secret Admirer

I’m not saying the farm truck doesn’t need a good cleaning-out, it’s just that we really need all that stuff to do our jobs: gloves, scallion trimmers, bands, bug spray, sunscreen, Tyvek tape, rain jacket, and hermit bars (thanks Mom!). What’s more–we need that envelope on the dash containing a letter we recently received  from a CSA member—but don’t know who—which we’ve been passing around and re-reading:

Dear Drumlin Team, In this peculiar pandemic period, there’s something deeply reassuring about Mother Earth and her cornucopia of green, red & yellow goodness courtesy of your hard work. All week, I look forward to the ritual of receiving from your generous hands a box of healthy food. The quality of your produce is astonishing—gleaming, ripe, beautiful, curvy, wavy, crunchy, delicious. I don’t like not meeting you, thanking you. The touch-free handoff feels alien! Nonetheless, my gratitude is greater, surpasses our restraints. Thank you for the care with which you pick, sort, wash, pack. For the weeds beat back. For the heat endured. For the sweat running down your back. Thank you for saving our summer, bring us joy from the earth. Respectfully.

Whoever you are, thank you so much for taking the time to write that! It’s an amazing group of farmers, volunteers, and Audubon staff members who together make the CSA Farmshare happen from week to week, and they all deserve to hear your moving words, to be reminded of why we do this work.

This is the last week for the summer CSA, and next week begins the fall program. Fall members will enjoy the end of what has been a stellar tomato and melon season, and a bountiful potato and winter squash harvest will provide good eating through Thanksgiving. There are still some spots open for our fall share, so join today if you haven’t already, and help us spread the word to others that may be interested!

Out in the fields we’re hoeing fall carrots and greens, bringing in the last of the winter squash (two varieties to go!) and preparing fields for cover cropping. Two days of rain last week means we expect to have a steady supply of field greens through frost!

Your Farmers

Crops Update: Double Rainbow Moments

A few teasing thunderstorms last week brought a faint double rainbow on Wednesday evening, but little in the way of rain. Then, Sunday afternoon, it finally poured! Peppers, eggplant, cauliflower, and cabbage had been wilting in the drought and not producing much. Hopefully, in a week or so, we’ll see an improvement in harvests of these crops. Beans, tomatoes, beets, watermelon, and cantaloupe have been thriving in the drought, and we expect to continue picking lots of each in the week ahead.

We’re now harvesting from the second succession of watermelons, so we get to savor our three favorite varieties all over again starting with the small, round, pink-fleshed Mini Love, moving on to the personal-sized, zeppelin-shaped Dark Belle, and finishing with Shiny Boy, striped, bullet-proof medicine balls. On Saturday morning, Paige (taught by Margot, who was taught by Fred) taught Nina how to move and install electric fencing, and together they protected watermelons #2 from the deer and coyotes that have already started breaking them open and eating them up. Deer continue to be our primary pest problem, and, over the past two days, we’ve been forced into an early harvest of all pumpkins and most of the winter squash.

The drought caused early die-back of the vines, and the deer have taken advantage of the easy access and visibility to browse the rows, biting hundreds of squash and pumpkins only once or twice, rather than eating all of a few like a respectful pest might. We estimate we’ve lost 15% of the butternut squash and pumpkin crop to deer, but about 40% of the butternuts have scarring from shallow deer bites. In the foreground, above, you can see piles of bitten squash we had to leave behind this past Saturday afternoon. The team stayed late that day to move the butternut into the greenhouse, and we wouldn’t have gotten as much done without the help of volunteers Nathan and Jake. Thanks all for doing the heavy lifting in the heat and humidity! This morning, we finished salvaging the pumpkins and then moved on to some new varieties of winter squash we’re trialing this year like the warty Black Futsu you can see in the foreground below.

Also on Saturday, we had a successful Somerville market at Union Square thanks to help from some additional volunteers, and a busy day of sales at the Drumlin farmstand. There, the volunteer trio of Basha, Nancy and Richard (from L to R above) are now teaming up on a regular basis. Thanks to help from volunteers Linda and Leah, we were able to open the farmstand for the first time this year on Sunday as well. Both have run the farmstand in years past, so with a little training on the new technology from Visitor Services staffer Marcia, they were prepared to begin selling again putting to good use their familiarity with more unusual crops like ground cherries.  

So, visitors now have access to our food on Saturdays and Sundays, and more people are getting involved in the process of selling and producing it. When I farmed for a nonprofit on Long Island, a neighboring large-scale potato producer would object that our CSA didn’t “feed the world” like a real farm. Perhaps he meant we didn’t put bags of potatoes on shelves in grocery stores the world over. Yes, we are not commodity farmers, but community-based ones who endeavor to promote health, both environmental and individual, through meaningful work and delicious, beautiful food. And we’re trying to engage as many people as possible in all parts of the process, from camp kids picking cherry tomatoes (thanks for the one hundred pounds this past Friday!) to volunteers like Jake and Christine whose continuing connection to Drumlin began with a commuter rail ride to Lincoln to help us plant garlic last fall. Check out Christine’s wonderful retelling of that experience in her recently published comic.

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Walking Though Forest

Take a Family Tour of the Metro West Outdoors

As we adjust to new safe, meaningful ways to interact with nature, a new opportunity has bloomed for families in the Metro West area. Family groups of up to ten can now take private, guided tours of Drumlin Farm, Broadmoor, and Habitat Wildlife Sanctuaries.

A Mass Audubon Naturalist (masked and with appropriate social distancing) will lead your group on a two-hour exploration of your sanctuary of choice, guiding you through hands-on investigations of plants and animals, and observing and explaining ecosystem interactions and characteristics. Chose one of the offered themes, or customize one to your group’s interests. Optional activities for children such as scavenger hunts, nature drawing, movement activities, or story creation can also be arranged. Take a break from the screens with a safe, energizing trip through the great outdoors!

Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary, Natick

An expansive retreat along Indian Brook and the Charles River, Broadmoor is an ever-changing environment teeming with wildlife: dragonflies darting, turtles basking, otters leaving tracks in the mud, and more than 150 species of birds. Easy-to-moderate well-groomed trails lead you through the shade of mature woodlands into open fields and along the edges of streams, ponds, and marshland. 

Themes: The Wonders of the Marsh, Field Mysteries, Into the Woods

Availability: Tuesdays–Fridays, August 4–October 30

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Habitat Wildlife Sanctuary, Belmont

Four miles of gentle trails wind through deciduous and evergreen forests, across meadows, and around ponds and vernal pools at Habitat, located just seven miles from downtown Boston. Stop by and say hello to our family of goats on your trip!

Themes: Meadow Investigations, Pond Probe, Birds, Reptiles & Amphibians, Predator or Prey, Fairy Houses & Gnome Homes

Availability: Monday–Friday, August 3–October 16

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Drumlin Farm Wildlife Sanctuary, Lincoln

At Drumlin Farm, you can experience life on a working farm and explore a wildlife sanctuary at the same time. Watch the pigs, sheep, goats, chickens, and cows in the farmyard; see how crops are sustainably grown; walk the trails explore field, forest, and wetland habitat; and observe resident owls, hawks, and a fox in the native wildlife exhibit. 

Themes: Farm Chores, Pond Explorations, Habitat Hike

Availability: Monday–Friday, September 14–December 18

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Squash

Crops Update: Persevering through Drought & Deer

What a relief the past two cloudy, 70 degree days have been! Last week was a real trial for plants and farmers alike with several days in the 90s and the soil surface completely dried out and often hot to the touch. Nina described kneeling on the ground during the drought and heatwave as similar to dipping your foot into too hot bath water: you retreat and then try again after mentally preparing yourself for some pain. Many, many thanks to the team and volunteers who continued to get the job done under these challenging conditions!

Above, you can see the effects of the drought in the winter squash patch. Despite the early die-back of the vines, it looks like the plants got enough moisture when they needed it, and we have a huge crop. With the vines no longer protecting some of the squash, we’ll start bringing them into the greenhouse this week when we’re not harvesting tomatoes and melons.

Betting on the forecast finally being accurate, we seeded a half-acre to greens and turnips yesterday afternoon. And, after 13 frustrating days without rain, we got about a quarter-inch last night. Hooray! Last week, we had to skip our weekly seeding of greens and radish, because, given how hot and dry it’s been, it would have been a waste of seed and time. The turnips you see germinating above were seeded two days before our last precipitation from Isaias on August 4. It’s amazing to witness what the Drumlin soil can do with so little water.

The fall kale and broccoli patch you see above is bordered on the left by the second-to-last succession of summer squash, and all of it was planted by the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) on July 18. We’ve had less than an inch of rain since that day, so it must be the high percentage of organic matter in the soil that’s retaining moisture down below and supporting these beautiful plants. Kate from AMC brought another group of volunteers to the farm this past Saturday, and they finally got to work with us on a reasonably cool day. Together, we planted 3,200 lettuce seedlings before harvesting some cherry tomatoes. We donated those to Concord Open Table the following day. Volunteers from Concord Open Table now pick up donations from Drumlin twice per week, and we continue to deliver produce to food for free every Thursday as part of our restaurant route.  

If you’ve wondered about all the additional fencing in the fields, the berserk deer population is the explanation. In addition to battling the extreme weather, we’re fighting the deer for our food. They’re trying to eat melons, chard, lettuce, beets, carrots, and sweet potatoes, and we’re responding with a combination of electric fences, repellant sprays, and small sections of twine fences. At the farmstand, you may have noticed umbrellas, a black shade cloth, and up in the rafters, an enormous, white, kite-shaped cloth, all put in place by Property Manager Geoff to help keep the sun from baking volunteers and veggies in the CSA farm share boxing area. Geoff also cleared brush from along the back of the farmstand to provide more space for people to spread out on Wednesdays while weighing and bagging produce. Thanks very much Geoff for helping us stay cool and for helping keep the produce as fresh as possible!

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Tomatoes

Crops Update: Hot Weather & Flavorful Yields

The First Winter Squashes

It’s looking like fall in the greenhouse with the arrival of the season’s first winter squash: Sunshine orange kabocha. We harvested them last Thursday as soon as we saw the vines dying back leaving the fruit exposed. If we can detect orange in the field, so can the deer, and the deer love to bite into all types of winter squash, especially the orange kabocha and pumpkins. Those are storage onions you see drying on the benches around the crates of squash below, and those seedling trays behind them hold the second-to-last lettuce planting of 2020.

Lower & Lean

With transplanting nearly complete, we are spending most of our time weeding beds and harvesting melons, potatoes, peppers, and tomatoes. In the hoophouse, the cherry tomato vines are over twenty feet tall, so it’s time to “lower and lean” them. We get up on the ladder, clip the top growth to the twine, then let out three or four turns on the spool allowing the whole plant to sit down. Then we lean the plants to the side by jumping the spools to an adjacent zip tie or by sliding the tie along a truss. The lean provides easier access to the fruit and prevents a crimp from forming at the base of the vine. The red Sakuras on the right have been lowered and leaned, while the orange Golden Sweets on the left await their turn.

Why Are Our Crops So Flavorful?

Out in the field it’s hot and dry. You can check out your town’s drought status too–if looking at the powdery soil or your burnt lawn is not informative enough! Hurricane Isaias blew down some of our tall flowers and brought a little rain, but we’ll need more precipitation to ensure a bountiful fall harvest. In the meantime, we’re wearing our hats (check out Greg’s superb chapeau below) and enjoying the intensity of flavors in melons and tomatoes brought out by these extreme weather conditions. Jill’s theory is that our field cherry tomatoes taste better than those from the hoophouse because those in the field are not irrigated. If true, that would be the first on-farm example of something we’ve been saying for years: Drumlin produce tastes this good because it’s not watered- down. But the hoophouse cherries are also more fibrous than those from the field, which is strange considering that the fall and winter hoophouse greens were far more tender than their field counterparts.

Extreme Weather

Leaving aside the mystery of the watered hoophouse cherry tomatoes, we know for certain that we need more water on crops in the field! And some days not in the 90s would be much appreciated. This past Friday, we had to harvest the watermelon and cantaloupe first thing in the morning just to keep the fruit cool. We then stored them under tents (pictured above) to keep the sun off until we had a chance to wash and load them into the box truck and walk-in cooler. We’re doing our best not to overburden the under-sized reefer unit on the market truck, and if you let the sun hit the melons for any length of time, you wind up with dozens of molten crates radiating heat for the rest of the day.

Volunteers Needed

While it’s hot out there under the August sun, amazingly, volunteers continue to come and help us harvest in the fields and box CSA shares at the admissions area. But some of our regular community volunteers are beginning to quarantine themselves in preparation for college, so we’ll be needing more help through the fall. If you’ve been considering volunteering at the farm, now would be a perfect time. It’s a great way to get out, meet other masked people, and join in meaningful work that supports Mass Audubon’s conservation goals. In the past, at the end of August volunteer sessions, we’d gather round and cut into some watermelons and cantaloupe. Now we just send volunteers home with a melon to enjoy later. It’s different, but everyone who helps should know the sweetness they make possible.

Your Farmers

Credit: Jocelyn Finlay

Crops Update: The Return of Flowers

Good thing we didn’t give up on the flower patch when we learned that selling ornamental flowers wouldn’t be permitted at Union Square during the pandemic. Volunteer Sheila continued seeding them in the greenhouse, the farm team kept up with the transplanting, and community volunteers and camp kids went after the weeds in the patch. Last week we learned that the rules had changed and we would once again be able to sell all types of flowers. Hooray! Volunteer Coordinator Pam had already arranged for volunteers to help us cut edible flower stems on Friday evenings, so we were in good position to ramp up and start cutting the previously underutilized zinnias, dahlias, cosmos, celosia, strawflower, gomphrena, rudbeckia, statice, amaranth, ageratum, grasses, and all the other flowers we have come to love growing. The flower work went on well into Friday evening, and the stage was set for a successful day of sales both at the farm and in Somerville.  

In addition to the moment of the full blooming of the flower patch, we’ve reached those magical few weeks when our fields are producing several summer favorites at once: melons, corn, and tomatoes. By next week, we’ll have harvested the last sweet corn of the season.  

Many thanks to Jill, Margaret, Jack, Highsmith, and Avril (plus more market volunteers!) for creating such beautiful displays at the farmer’s market, and for selecting and bagging the items for each customer. Pre-COVID, customers would wander around under the tents, pick out their own produce, and our work mostly involved ringing people up, restocking, bagging greens, and shifting the display as items sold out or needed more visibility. Despite our fears that the new system would hurt sales, weekly totals are now outpacing last season’s.

On Saturday, back at the farm, Paige, Nina and I worked with the second volunteer group of the year from the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC). Once again it was hot out there, and the dry soil felt like sand. Together we finished this year’s onion harvest before planting lettuce, fennel, and the last summer squash succession of the season. Volunteers Kate and Lesley stayed late to help us get the last plants in the ground. Thanks AMC for the much-needed help! The unexpected rain that came on Sunday afternoon helped water-in those seedlings, and it would have hurt the keeping quality of those last onions—so, double bonus. That Sunday rain also arrived just after I finished seeding some fall turnips, beets, and carrots in anticipation of a potential soaking from the remnants of hurricane Isaias later tomorrow. We hope that still happens as all this sunny, 90 degree weather is rapidly drying out the soil.

Your Farmers

Crops Update: Impeding Crop Pests

August arrives on Saturday, and we’ve mostly finished establishing crops for the season. What we’re thinking about now is the harvest—when to go after it, how best to move it, and where to put it all. We shifted today’s harvest session from the afternoon to the morning in order to escape the worst of the heat. By 10 a.m., we had lugged around 500 pounds each of potatoes, cucumbers, and summer squash!

Friends & Family Volunteering

We were joined by my sister’s youngest, Bea, and it has been a joy for me to work with both Margot and Bea over the past two days. However, it’s time for Margot to prepare for college, so after two months of some of the best volunteer help imaginable (more than 50 hours per week!), we need to say our goodbyes. It’s fitting that on Saturday morning Margot taught Paige how to install deer fencing around a crop. Over the years, volunteer Fred has taught many Drumlin farmers how to do this job, including Jill and Margot, and together, the two of them have done all the fencing of strawberries and corn this year. But on Saturday, with Jill at market, Margot took on the instructor’s role, and together with Paige, they made sure the second planting of corn got protected. Thanks Margot for all your great work since the end of May (and during the previous three seasons), and to Bea for your help hauling heavy crops on this the hottest day of the year! And thanks as always to the farm team for warmly welcoming my family members into our group.

Tomato Hornworm ©William Hottin

Combating Deer & Tomato Hornworm

All that fencing we’re doing is a response to the growing deer population on the sanctuary and the damage they’re causing. They’re even getting into the hoophouse through the side vents! We were installing a deer barrier around the second chard patch on Thursday afternoon when a lightning storm surprised us and delivered a much-needed soaking to the fields—the last significant rain had fallen on July 5. We admired the storm from the hoophouse where the cherry tomatoes have almost reached the ceiling. The plants are producing lots of fruit now, but are also being munched by tomato hornworms—snake-thick caterpillars filled with an alarming amount of goo. They are well-camouflaged amongst the vines, and finding and removing them has become a bit of competition amongst us. Jack got 13 today—impressive!

More Crops on the Horizon

We are half-way through the onion harvest thanks to the continued good work of the afternoon community volunteer groups. Friday’s group helped us harvest beans and mini eggplant for market before crating up the first storage onions of the season. Some of those volunteers then stayed into the evening to cut flowers for sale the next day at Drumlin’s farmstand. Saturday’s volunteers planted collards and storage kohlrabi—the last of the fall brassicas. They also weeded beans and carrots in addition to harvesting more storage onions. We finished the day’s work  by hoisting the shade cloth up and over the greenhouse where the onions are drying. By the end of this week, the greenhouse will be completely filled with onions, and we’ll be wondering where to put the last of the lettuce seedling trays. Also, by the end of the week, we hope to harvest the first watermelons and full-size Italian eggplant of the season.

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