The Months That Got Away From Me

August 2
Today I pulled the rest of the garlic and cleaned up the beds. Doesn't look like a huge crop this year as the bulbs are only small to medium in size, with a handful of larger ones. Likely because I just didn't get the scapes cut off in time, with everything that was going on. Lots of small bulbs of garlic is definitely better than no garlic though, so we'll try again for a bumper crop next year! The total was 672 bulbs of varying sizes, small to large. I would say we only got about 6 bulbs that were large enough to be considered seed garlic, so I'll be ordering next year's seed soon.











I hung the bulbs in bundles of 10 to dry. After a couple of weeks, they were trimmed and spread out to dry further on a table. I sold the larger cloves at our roadside stand and we'll be using the smaller bulbs throughout the winter.

August 15
Erin and I went to the market this past Saturday. We talked to several of the farmers there, there are three local places that grow naturally, one being a smaller one-man operation like ours and the other two being larger farms that offer CSA boxes. We purchased products and spent some time with each of them and enjoyed our time there a great deal. My biggest mistake this year was not taking into account more of what it would take to turn a garden into a market farm. I planted a lot more things that were indulgent and fun to grow and also a lot of things that were just for us. Next year I need to concentrate on what we can sell, and then what we don't sell, we need to either eat, preserve, or turn into another product to sell or store for winter use. For example, if we don't sell all our garlic scapes, we can pickle what's left and sell or use the pickled scapes.

Heartnut tree, planted in 2015

I spent the rest of August in the orchard, soon to be food forest. Added 5 goji berry, a sea buckthorn, a cherry shrub, 4 highbush blueberries, a haskap bush and a red currant vine. This was the beginning of the perennial shrub layer, added to the existing canopy of heartnut, pear, plum, cherry, pecan, chum, Asian pear, elderberry and mulberry trees. Now that all the shrubs are all planted, I set to making sure they were all weed free, the ground around it covered with carpenter's paper and well mulched. I had purchased cedar mulch earlier in the year and used at least a bag around each tree and shrub. Once my load of wood chips gets delivered from the local tree trimming company, I'll cover the grass in between with more carpenter's paper and fill in the rest with wood chips. By next spring, the grass underneath should be well rotted and eaten up by the worms and I'll be able to pull the wood chips back and plant whatever perennials or annuals I want.

Goji berry bush, planted 2018

There are still a few trees to acquire and plant as well. I want another mulberry tree or two, a couple more Asian pears and at least three apple trees. I also need to replace one of the heartnut trees as it didn't make it through last winter. Besides adding those trees next year, I'd like to purchase and install most of the small fruit we plan on having. I plan on adding a lot more sea buckthorn, as well as goumi berry (cherry olive), as both are nitrogen fixers, meaning their presence will, in a way, fertilize all surrounding trees and shrubs by creating nitrogen for them to feed off of. We also want lots of grapes, kiwi, currants, gooseberries, blackberries, raspberries of all colors and some lesser known types of berries as well, including aronia and thimbleberries.

Shallots

Baby Red Kuri squash

Baby Carnival acorn squash

September began the beginning of many big harvests. It was such a dry summer, we had tomatoes ripening on the vine for the first time in several years. It was also the first summer in 3 or 4 years that the tomato plants were in the ground until the frost. Usually they're so riddled with late blight by the end of August, the tomatoes are all pulled green and left to ripen in cardboard boxes over the next couple of weeks.

The summer of 2018 turned out to be a pretty amazing year for tomatoes. I had loads of cherry tomatoes, you can see the varieties I grew below on the right, smallest to largest. Sweetie tomato is the top variety, and though they were prolific, they didn't seem to have the storage value nor flavor that the other varieties have. The Orange Russolini were prolific as well and tastier than the Sweeties. Black cherry is the next variety in the image, my old standby as I love the flavor and the final one is Gardeners' Delight, a large and reliable variety of cherry tomato.

I was pleased with the variety of paste tomato I grew this year, Opalka. They were very successful and prolific (below, left). 

When the frost hit at the end of September, it was time to pull the tomatoes off the vine. We used lots as they ripened on the vine and unfortunately those did not get weighed. The final harvest was weighed though and totaled over 25 lbs. We used the tomatoes fresh over the next few weeks, as they ripened and any that we could not use while fresh were tossed into a freezer bag for winter use.

The pepper plants were also harvested before the first frost occurred. I harvested the Anchos a few weeks earlier to dry and sell, as well as the first bunch of jalapenos. Most of the peppers were used fresh in various dishes.

The squashes and melons had to be pulled before the frost as well. We had a great squash crop this year, harvesting over 70 lbs of buttercup, acorn, delicata, sweet dumpling, spaghetti and kuri squash. We used a lot of the delicata for stuffed squash, roasted the acorns, kuri and buttercups. They were very good but the spaghetti squash had a weird disease or fungus on it and they didn't keep very well. I was very happy with the other varieties and they were all delicious.

The melons didn't fare as well, they were too small at the time of frost to be eaten. They just weren't planted early enough to get enough days in to ripen, but there's always next year!

I didn't plant very many flowers this year, which was a HUGE mistake that I will remedy in 2019. Fortunately, last year's sunflowers reseeded and a lot of them came up for us to enjoy.

The shallots were incredible this year. I've never grown them so large before. Even the Zebrune variety were enormous. The onions grew well, but not large this year. A lot of them were of a golf ball size, but they are still keeping very well, even now at the end of January. Total harvest for shallots was 10 lbs, white onions - 15 lbs, and red onions - 5.5 lbs.

Although we didn't have a huge sweet potato harvest, only getting 10 lbs out of the 4' x 8' bed I planted (image, right), I still consider it a successful year for sweet potatoes. For one, the flavor they had was incredible! They were just the regular old grocery store variety that I grew the slips from and considering I planted them very late (end of July), they grew fairly large. I have hopes for a great harvest this summer if I can get them in the ground at the beginning of June. We ended up using most of ours for pies.

Garlic was a big hit at the roadside stand this summer, so I made sure to plant lots in October. I ordered and planted 13 pounds of seed in total, plus I planted a couple new varieties that I ordered from a different company.

The goji bushes that were planted in August have a few berries on them now. I have two different varieties now as I scored a couple plants when the sales were starting. I'll be purchasing a 3rd variety called "Firecracker" next year.

Carrots were the last thing to be harvested, just after the first snowfall. We used them well into December.

We had a surprise in October, when I spotted these growing on one of our oyster mushroom logs (image, left). We lost the first one that grew to mushroom flies, but these ones were harvested and used in a meal. They were delicious and I'm looking forward to having more of our own mushrooms this year. Our Shiitake logs should produce in the spring and we'll hopefully have some of the Red Wine Cap mushrooms popping up from the spawn I spread around last year. We also had an enormous horseradish harvest (image, right).

Overall, 2018 was a great learning year and at this point I can't really ask for more than that! I met a lot of really nice and very interesting people that stopped in to chat, get a tour or just buy something from the table out front. Next year I hope to be better about creating regular blog posts and I have no doubt there will be plenty to write about as we continue to add to our food forest and increase production on the farm.  I look forward to meeting more people in the community, growing new and deliciously healthy varieties of fruits and vegetables and most of all, just smelling the flowers and enjoying the sunshine. There were definitely plenty of failures and successes in the field to build on for next year. More to come on what's in store for 2019!