October! Here we are in the home stretch. All the strawberries and over-winter flowers were planted last week and watered in. Tuesday’s big rain made sure everything got plenty of water! The cover crops are up and growing. We spent much on Monday of this week digging sweet potatoes. We dug somewhere between 600-700# of sweet spuds in one bed. There’s still a bed and a half left to dig. We grew three varieties this year: Beauregard, Georgia Jet, and Centennial. The Centennial’s have a very light ora skin to them, where the Georgia Jet’s are pretty close to fushia, and the Beauregard is more of a light brown. They all seemed to grow very well this season with some individual tubers weighing in at 3 or 4#!
We’re finally going to break ground on the farm pond next Wednesday. What a process it has been. Yikes. It should take about a week to finish the work, and by the end of the month we should have a full pond. We’ll let it settle over the winter and we’ll dig a new header line connecting the current system to a spot close to the pond where our pump can be set up. Next season we will have reliable and clean water, no more worries about what’s happening up stream from us.
Clean up is the name of the game at this point in the season. We’re taking down the tomatoes in the greenhouses, cleaning & folding up landscape fabric, mowing down the last of the summer crops, and rolling up a little more drip tape. There are a few more things going in the ground before the end: garlic & onions will go in around the 15th and there are some more lettuces & kales to plant in the greenhouses for our late December markets and to sustain the farmers over the winter.