Week 13, 2014-15

Finally a cold blast has hit.  We came out of the weather in pretty good shape except for the zucchini which amazingly produced for 12 weeks and eggplant which never produced a fruit.  Otherwise we were good.  We covered up a few crops with freeze cloth and tightened up the greenhouse.  We also moved around some cold sensitive crops to the shop overnight.
I noticed a potato starting to emerge from the row and I still haven't planted the another row yet, but that will give us a few weeks spacing between crops.
We harvested our first nice looking red cabbage last week and it tasted great.  We had an awesome salad week with red kale, red cabbage, green leaf lettuce, red leaf lettuce, a little bit of broccoli, tomato, and some store bought carrots.  Delicious!  I was surprised to see everyone gobbling it up and the whole bowl of salad disappeared in a day.
I planted more lettuce and cauliflower this last week and some more carrots.  I'd like to see our own in the refrigerator. I also sowed seeds for eggplants, peppers, and butternut squash.  We are going to give that a try this year from a recommendation I got at the end of last season.

beautiful red cabbage

protecting the greens

ice in the field

Week 12 harvest

Week 10, 2014-15

We are approaching the halfway point of the season, which is hard to believe.  We are having varying degrees of success with different crops.  This year the lettuce is looking great, whereas last year we struggled to produce a couple weeks of lettuce.  We are now into our third week of lettuce and hopefully it will remain strong.  Broccoli is intermittent and started off poorly with a hungry rabbit.  We have had two weeks of harvest and will have to wait a few more for another round.  Last year the tomatoes were great with cherry and larger fruiting tomatoes aplenty.  This year the tomatoes are being affected by something to be determined.  Nothing has changed culturally except I have switched to a clear plastic roof as opposed to a white roof to increase light and get better fruiting.  That seemed to be the case until I noticed the 'Sakuras' getting some sort of leaf scortch or blight. It is now on the 'Charger' and 'Celebrity'. Hopefully we will be able to determine what it is.  Carrots are not cooperating again.  Two years ago we had the same issue.  Last year we had decent success.  A big winner this year is the sweet potato 'Covington'.  This will be the 10th week of harvest off of one row.  We have planted one row of red LaSoda potatoes thanks to help from the boys (Nathan and Noah) and some awkward help from a scraper blade turned furrow maker/hiller.  It took a while to get the implement to cooperate and I broke a hammer in the process, but it beat digging a trench and covering it by hand.  We will wait a week and plant another row.  I also have some 'Peter Wilcox' to try out, which is a purple skinned/yellow flesh variety that is supposedly really tasty.  We will see...

checking out the new potato furrow  

finished potato hill

snake in the field