Farms Reach – Fall 2020

Hi all,
We made it! Through another growing season. I love this time of year – so many incredible colors and such abundance.
We planted garlic today at Goosefoot, some as crew crops and some for the food bank. Sam disced the field and it looks so different and so empty now! At Farm’s Reach, the greenhouse is planted with arugula and spinach. I’m hoping I got the timing right for a nice early crop in the late winter!

It was a great year at Goosefoot, honestly better than I could have imagined. It was so amazing to have the crew, both for the good company and fun and for the help in tackling so much! The soil is so great in the valley, and we grew some beautiful and prolific veggies.

Not much to report from Farm’s Reach since the last report in July. I had some beautiful tomatoes and a nice harvest overall, but unfortunately I had a lot of struggles too. The eggplants kept on being ravaged by voles, and by the time fruit was ready to be harvested, I was left with about 5 of the original 40 plants, which is pretty bad to say the least. At one point I tried cutting the bottoms out of plastic gallon size pots and using that as a sort of collar around the plant, and whether it was coincidence or not, it did seem to help. I also had some pretty bad loss from theft. The peppers were all stolen by the boxful before they had turned red (I wish I was kidding!!). Whoever was taking from the greenhouse also liked to harvest all the cherry tomatoes. I couldn’t tell for sure if they were taking any of the slicers. I put up a sign notifying guests from Farm’s Reach that the veggies were for the food bank, and if they were needing food to please visit the food bank or to email us to volunteer. I’m guessing since so many more people were eating outside for covid safety, it made the garden more visible and more tempting. Anyway, sorry to be delivering these disappointing news and I’m sorry too that I wasn’t able to deliver more of the crops I was hoping to. Just glad I was able to put in more hours at Goosefoot! My total for the year is 276 lbs, which is considerably less than last year, but in my opinion still pretty good since I was not using any of the outdoor raised beds to grow food this year, which halved my growing space.
Attaching some photos here from July-on.
Alexa

Here is the video of a sphinx moth visiting nasturtiums in the greenhouse!! I’d never seen one of these before and it surprised and delighted me 🙂

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