Crop Report, September 2016

We haven't done this one for a while - so here you go!

We do these sorts of posts in part for our own reflection and in part because folks in our area sometimes find it useful to see how things are doing here in comparison to their own gardens.  Sometimes our observations validate what is going on at their place.  Other times, it makes them feel like they've done very well.  And, occasionally, it only serves to make you feel like you did fail on a given crop - but don't worry - we're "professionals."  If we can make something grow and you can't, you can just use that excuse.  If it's the other way around, you can tell everyone how you can do better than the "professionals."

Lettuce Be Thankful
That this is not intended to be an all-puns, all-the-time post.  But, a pun here and there just adds to the flavor.

We re-dedicated ourselves to our lettuce crop and have found some real success in that area.

Last year's total harvest for lettuce was just over 1000 heads for about 350 pounds of product and the year before the numbers were 1500 and 450.  As of September 7, we are at 1822 heads and 838 pounds for the season.  The great thing about that?  We still have the Fall crop to go.  I don't think we'll get to the 1500 pounds from 2009, but we also had trouble moving all of the lettuce that year.  Sometimes records just aren't what they're cracked up to be.  All indicators are that the amount of lettuce we have grown has been well-received and of good quality.  It's nice to start a crop report post with a positive.

Sa Squash of GFF
Ok, I'll admit that one is a bit of a reach.  But, I did want to talk about a crop we often ignore in these reports.  In fact, the last time we talked about Summer Squash and Zucchini that I can recall was in 2010.

We've been modifying how we grow the summer squashes over the past several years for a few reasons.  First, changes to other crops resulted in moving these crops from one part of the rotation to another.  When you change conditions for a crop, you should probably expect a change in production, which there was.  We also reduced our production levels because we felt like there were too many good fruit going to waste on these plants and we didn't feel like there was enough of a market to move the excess at the numbers we were producing.  That, and our CSA members were telling us they couldn't use that many fruit either.  So, we cut back on this crop so we could concentrate more on other crops.

That brings me to a 'sidebar.'  There are often markets for items if we grow larger amounts of excess (and sell at a lower, bulk price), but it is easy to get caught with an odd amount of extra product that is less easy to sell.  We were landing there far too often.

This season, production numbers still have not been fantastic, but I need to remind myself that we have reduced production and I still have memories of years with higher numbers simply because of the amount we were growing.  Our first succession is largely finished and the second succession will get its first pick on Thursday of this week.  We were sitting at just over 700 summer squash and almost 600 zucchini with only that first succession.  If the second does similarly, we are on target for numbers that exceed both 2014 and 2015, but are well below some of the high production years.  In short, fairly comfortable numbers.

Why Should I Carrot All?
We tried seeding our carrots on the farm more than once this season and the germination rates were poor in all but one case - the batch in our high tunnel.  We were not the only ones in Iowa having this issue, so I guess we don't feel all that bad.  Ok, we do.  But the reality about carrots for us is this - direct seeded carrots can be picky and we have Jeff Sage growing carrots for our CSA in addition to what we grow.  That safety net allows us to concentrate on other crops and not waste too much time on the carrots.

We have certainly grown great carrots in the past.  We expect to grow them again in the future.  We were able to pull out 122 pounds from the high tunnel planting which is on par with the 109 pounds last year.  But, we don't have the additional field carrots (we had over 1000 pounds in 2013, for example).  The good news?  See the next crop.

Minding Your Peas and Cukes
We are actually going to focus on the cuke part of this one today.  Why?  Because I hear the people of this world crying out, "Peas! No more puns!"  What?

The cucumber crop actually did better than last year, even though our numbers do not necessarily indicate that.  We harvested just under 3000 fruit this year (up only slightly from 2015), but they came over a longer period of time -which was a goal we had for this year.   And, there were many cucumbers we did not harvest.  So, it is likely that our numbers would have easily reached the 5000 mark we hit in 2012 and 2013.  We see no reason to pursue 2010's record of 7300 at any point in the near future.

It is only natural that readers might wonder why we left perfectly good cucumbers in the field.  The answer my friends, is in the available resources - primary of which is time and secondary is space.  Perhaps we have the space, but then we would need more time to make that space.  And, we would need time to distribute or sell more cucumbers.  Suffice it to say, the cucumbers did what was needed and we had to recognize that they were only one crop of many.

On the plus side, we were able to send cucumbers to Grinnell Heritage Farm and Blue Gate Farm this year.  And, it is possible we can get some carrots from Grinnell later in the year if Jeff doesn't have them.  See, things work out.

Would you like to see more crop reports like this one?  Tell us which crops you want to hear about!