We’ve come to late July, the part of the season where it feels impossible to keep up with the tasks and in the average market farmer’s mind, everything is behind. Everything needs harvesting, the weeds are supercharged with water and heat, there’s a pileup of plants that need to go in, there’s a pileup of seeds that need to be sown, the tomatoes need trimming again, and it is easy to feel like everything is out of control.
Us humans would like to keep things growing at a pace that feels manageable on our time scales, but that’s not how this planet works. And for farmers, who plant far more than they can reasonably take care of (ha!) it’s like juggling 100 bowling pins and watching them fall one by one, hoping there’s enough bowling pins left at the end so you can say you’re still juggling.
All you can do is keep on planting.
One thing I think we’ve done really well this season is keep on top of bed-flipping. I used to wait until an entire bed was finished, or harvest it gingerly and wait and wait to plant again. This year, as soon as something is finished, something goes in. For items like green onions, I plant as we harvest. For other crops, I’ve taken to harvesting the entire bed just so I can turn it over and get something new in. This has helped a lot not only with produce availability but it keeps the weeds down nicely, as every bed flip resets the “weed clock” to zero.
Here’s a bed of turnips that was pulled just yesterday, and already today, along with 4 other beds, were planted up and ready to start over.
Over in the peppers, we have some very weedy pathways that I’m not sure I can even get to at this point. So it might just have to be that way. I’ll see if I have enough landscape fabric left to roll some out and smother them, but with several pathways like this that’s easily an entire morning of work, which with a task list as long as it is, is an opportunity cost. Or maybe this is a job for the weed whacker just to knock them back a bunch. This is a great example of why putting things in fabric mulch is good, because the peppers are going to be fine.
On the other hand there’s supposed to be pathways in between these tomatoes! But I definitely don’t have the time to get them propped up. They’re bush tomatoes anyway. My biggest problem is going to be voles. Just running a vole farm here, and they won’t touch peanut butter, so if anyone has ideas for what to bait traps with for voles let me know. Varmints got 50% of my fall carrots last year and were even eating the hot peppers! The vole problem is an unfortunate side effect of growing all these nice crops in these no-till beds, its a perfect habitat for them with a gourmet buffet within scurrying distance.
The Parsnips! It’s been on my to do list for a month, but I finally thinned them out. Look at these beauts. Two more months, let’s see how much they size up and what they taste like. The Parsnip Saga continues.
It took me about 10 days of working an extra hour here or there to get the hoop house tomatoes under control. I’m happy to report that at least I can walk between the aisles now. We’re also getting monster harvests and there’s still room for improvement so I think the hoop house is doing just dandy in it’s second season. These cherry tom plants are easily at 4 meters by this point and learning the” lower-and-lean” technique has had some hiccups but that’s to be expected as I’ve never done it before.
It’s also baby frog season. Thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of baby frogs are emerging from the creeks, and it’s been a great year for frogs with all the rain. They’re hopping all over the place! Here’s a little tree frog perched on a sunflower leaf.
Well that’s late July in the garden.
Hope your garden is doing well and if you feel like you’re behind, just keep going!
Graham
thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice
if you like this blog, please consider subscribing via email to get a post in your inbox once a week, or sharing it with someone you think might enjoy it too
Leave a Reply