We had an amazing basil harvest and thanks to a post harvest handling process we learned from the new herb module in the Neversink Farm course, it lasted a long time!
Instead of picking individual leaves the night before distribution and keeping it out of the cooler (because the cold supposedly turns it black), we let it grow a little bigger, harvest it by the handful, bag it and store it in the cooler with everything else.
Once our members receive it, they have a few options: keep it in the bag in their fridge or strip some leaves off the bottom of the stems and store in a glass of water like you would flowers.
We also harvested carrots from that blank spot and the lettuce to the right. Yes, there are carrots in there!
The weeds really come alive and explode this time of year, especially if cultivation falls behind. It’s a serious issue and our only hope is to tarp all of the beds after harvesting and let time, lack of light and heat do the work to remedy the situation.
This scene is the stuff of nightmares on an organic farm. It slows down the harvest to a crawl because the weeds are in the way, reduces airflow which promotes disease, provides habitat for pests and drops weed seeds by the thousands!
We just hit our limit this season and couldn’t stay on top of it.
All of our beets were starting to succumb to caterpillars so we chose to condense what should have been two weeks worth into one. We harvested a bed of red beets and a bed of gold beets, removed all the ravaged greens and bagged them.
It turned out to be a nice bag of beets for the CSA shares!
This bed of collards is beyond hope, more caterpillar troubles.
There were some caterpillars in the arugula but thankfully we were able to harvest it before any serious damage!
Harvested three heavy totes from each bed.
Two 50 ft beds gave all our members an 18oz bag each.
We had great success with carrots this season, they’ve been a lifesaver! We seeded all of the carrots for this season in January.
Despite the weeds overtaking the beds, we are pulling nice carrots out of the ground.
The greens aren’t so nice anymore, so we chose to remove them and bag the carrots.
We harvested our first bell peppers of the season!
This new plot has serious issues with excess water collecting in it. I think I’m going to have to dig ditches around the whole perimeter and along every tunnel edge.
We had to put on mud boots to harvest, at some point the water was up to our shins in the path!
We tarped the ground for the next tunnel, which will be our new propagation/nursery area.
Took a trip to arbor gate to pick up some culinary herbs (rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage, bay leaf) for the Vego Garden.
All the beds are filled now!
See you soon!
