by Adam Kramer & Rachael Chong
Published in September 2020
The sun has been shining this September and the growers at Hacienda Market Garden have been making full use of it! In a challenging year, the garden has been incredibly productive and heading into fall we are very pleased with the growing season so far and are feeling confident and hopeful for the seasons to come!
Like many of you, our work flow begins to shift as we head into September. A few of us are back to school, while we also begin include more volunteers into our work and shift from summer to fall harvesting. We’re excited to start the next chapter in the year!
Increasingly there are cooler days and nights in the garden, so we are readying ourselves to say goodbye to most of our summer vegetables. Night temperatures have gone down low enough that we’ve already had some patchy frost, so a hard killing frost might not be far off. We’ve come to welcome it in many ways as it lets us breathe a sigh of relief as the summer growing season ends in earnest.
On the other hand, we aren’t out of woods yet – weeds are still growing! Even in the first weeks of autumn we did a significant amount of work cultivating and hand-weeding in our onions and salad green beds – a bit of help to all our fall greens that are growing most excellently.
Fall means preparing for winter and the spring that follows. Our cover crops are really growing quickly, though would have benefited from a little more rain – it’s been dry lately! Daikon radish, oats, and buckwheat made up the bulk of our fall and winter cover crops, which will serve to protect and build our soil.
Our small scale lets us intensively manage our soil with less mechanization thanks to the hard work of a great bunch of gardeners (though there are fewer of us than in seasons past). The fall season has brought several long-time volunteer gardeners back to the garden and we are so happy to have their work, energy, and company again. There have been some great days of soaking up the sun and chatting as we’ve cleaned our cured garlic, onions, and shallots – which have been taking up way to much room in the shed (a sign of a good harvest!). Some of the garlic will be kept as seed to be planted in the coming weeks and some will appear in our CSA shares in October. We’re keen to share these storage crops with all our members!
Our CSA share season runs from mid-June through October, so there is still plenty of harvesting left to do. Celery, carrots, beets, and greens are a few of the staples for the month ahead, though we also have a few new trial crops we are excited to begin giving out to our CSA members. We’re always learning, adjusting, and planning for next season to make our shares even better!
