The Big Winners
– Garlic! We bought in a lot of garlic this year and also participated in a Slow Food St. Louis garlic project, where they gave out seed garlic from rare and heirloom varieties. They got well composted and mulched in the fall and as a result we have lots of really fantastic garlic. We brought in a total of 187.6 pounds. We save the biggest and best looking heads as seed to continually select for garlic that does best on this farm. We hope you enjoy the variety this year.
– Onions! Last year our onions got drowned in their seeding trays and then very weedy. This year we planted them on biodegradable plastic mulch to keep down the weeds and they did fantastic
– Beets! We direct seeded them last year and this year between transplanting them to give them an edge on the weeds and also using our new occultation tarps to bring down our weed pressure they have been way more bountiful.
– Fall brassicas! OK, I don’t want to count our chickens before they hatch, but they look fabulous. Much better germination than our spring brassicas.
Middle of the Road
These are crops where we’ve gotten about what we’d expect:
Cherry tomatoes, husk cherries, tomatillos, cucumbers, squash, carrots (though our fall germination looks excellent, we are hoping for a good turnaround!), radishes, turnips, basil.
The Losers
– Winter squash and melons. We’ve had a disease in them last year and this year. We got very few. We will distribute a mix of our pumpkins, butternut, acorn and delicata squash. I recommend using them sooner as they are less likely to hold as long as in a normal year.
– Potatoes. We plant our potatoes into trenches, and the heavy rains in June flooded the potatoes pretty badly, leading to a lot of loss and rot. We still have some more but not the yields we would expect.
– Sweet potatoes. This was my bad. I totally forgot to order them and then when they didn’t come I called on a daily basis and never heard back from them, then they ended up sending us a mix of what we had been looking for without warning. Only about half as many as we’d planned, though they look good. I am hoping for good quality, if lower yield.