Week 9, 2017-18 Season

"It is a hard year to be a grower of produce," one of our members said last week.  I heartily agree with that statement.  We survived another blast of cold.  The weather station at the UF Gulf Coast Research and Education Center had 25 F for their low.  They are a little south and west of us and are probably just slightly warmer.  When I checked on the plants the morning of the freeze there was ice on the plastic in the top of the greenhouse.  The min/max thermometer had 28 degrees inside where the tomatoes were.  Surprisingly, only the tops of the tomatoes got burned. The cucumbers didn't fair well either.  I had to replant them.  But all in all, we made out pretty well.  This time things turned out as I would have expected.  Cole crops survived, and the tropical trees at my work (mango, starfruit) were frozen and burned.  Interesting how each freeze is a new learning event. 

We are still waiting on strawberries and I will finally start to dig sweet potatoes this week.  We are planting lots of lettuce, cole crops, and the second half of potatoes left from last week's planting.  Next week we will begin getting the warm season crops in the ground; corn, beans, squash, melons, etc.  I am enjoying working in this cool weather and am not excited for the inevitable warm up to come.

Week 16, Season 2016-2017

We have reached the two thirds point of the season and the growing is going well.  Cabbage, snow peas, red beets, cauliflower, and komatsuna will be picking this weekend for the first time this season.  I just planted corn, beans, and a few different squash this week.  I will be transplanting peppers, lettuce, cabbage, bok choi, kale (finally) and a few different items this week.  I also hope to plant cantaloupe and melon transplants and Seminole pumpkin seeds to finish out all this year's plantings.  Cucumbers were planted in the greenhouse this week.  Potatoes are up and running and looking fine.  The cauliflower was doing amazing and we had some that were about 10-12 inch heads.  I came back after the rainy days and they had hideous black spots all over the heads and I had to cut and toss them over the fence to the cattle.  It was a trial as we have done poorly in the past, so I was relieved that I actually could grow them.  We will be able to harvest about half of the trial section and I now will add that to our list of plants to pursue.
This is probably our last week of sweet potato harvests and am happy that we got about 13 weeks out of our planting.  I found a great recipe for you to try to say farewell to the sweet potatoes.  I serendipitously ran across a sweet potato soup recipe that was delicious and extremely easy.  It was in Cook's Illustrated magazine.  Did you know that if you have a Hillsborough County library card you can download tons of magazines to your reading device for free!  I happened to figure this out two weeks ago and was pursuing the magazine rack and saw Cook's Ill. and low and behold there was a great recipe for this soup.  All you need is sweet potatoes, shallots (I used onions), butter, thyme, and water.  That is it. I made it for a bunch of friends along with smoked ribs and everyone commented on how great the soup was.  Here is a link to the recipe.  https://www.cooksillustrated.com/videos/3101-sweet-potato-soup  Enjoy!