Farm News- November 10, 2011

Hi Folks,

Well, there just doesn’t seem to be any limit to the kind of crazy weather that Mother Nature can throw at us these days! We got about 14 inches of snow from the storm and experienced two nights of frigid temperatures; 19 degrees last Sunday night. The low temperatures did the most damage; the snow actually protected most of the shorter crops, insulating them from the extremely cold air. We harvested everything we could that I thought would be damaged Friday, Saturday morning, and the again on Sunday afternoon. We had to cut all the cauliflower that was beginning to head, even at a very small size. With cauliflower the leafy part of the plant can withstand the cold, but the head freezes and is ruined. Broccoli is similar but the head can withstand lower temperatures. We cut all of the larger broccoli but most were too small and I hoped they would make it; alas, they did not. We still have two more plantings of broccoli that had not begun to head and which should produce in the next few weeks. We also still have some yellow cauliflower that has yet to head. Medium-sized lettuce that was a week or two from harvest had the outside leaves plastered to the ground by the snow, exposing the inner heart to the cold- – ruined. The chard and the beet tops were also decimated by the frigid air and will likely not recover. The bok choy that I was planning to distribute this week survived relatively unscathed as did the kale and the spinach. We lost power on Saturday and did not have service restored until Friday, but we were able to run the heat and the well pump on a generator I bought in the week after Irene. The shares will be a little bit light this week but should start to improve as we move into the last couple of weeks of the season.

The share for this week will be:
Lettuce (small heads), acorn squash, sweet potatoes, garlic, bok choy, carrots, parsnips, and tatsoi or other mustard green

Enjoy!
Farmer John