Week 54, 2019
The past few weeks has been focused on getting the market garden ready for fall, winter and next spring(Gastonia Farmer’s Market!). Cropping out multiple crops in the past weeks have allowed room to seed more fall crops.
In the High Tunnel:
- Cucumbers, zucchinis and eggplants are out.
- Two more 25ft sections of carrots were seeded.
- Kale was transplanted.
- We still have tomatoes, though they are slowing down. We will do two successions next year just like cucumbers to get a more consistent supply.
- Turmeric is doing great, though not the 5 feet tall that it should be this time of the year(we planted late). We will probably do this next year on a better schedule.
- Peppers are producing well and trellising them is seeming to do really well. There are lots of peppers growing the next month should have a really good crop.
- We will be seeding/starting transplants our fall/winter garden starting in September. We have planned; carrots, collards, spinach, more lettuce, tatsoi, beets.
Outside Plot:
Now that the high tunnel is done, we will be focusing on building out the outside plot. Lots of work to be done here and some has already started, but first this is what is growing and planned in the 4 beds we built in the spring.
- Asparagus is doing great, we might get a few stalks next spring, but not counting on it. We will be adding a layer of compost over the bed this fall/winter when the top growth dies back.
- The bed next to that has beans and carrots growing. We unfortunately didnt plan this out very well and are going to need to turn the bed over(remove the crops) next month to make way for 16 pounds of garlic. That will over winter in the bed and harvesting in June.
- The third bed has our summer lettuce trials in it. Four successions are in the ground and we hope to have the first harvest at the end of the month! Varieties are Muir, Cherokee and Red/Green Incised Salanova.
- The fourth and final bed is sweet potatoes and some acorn squash. Sweet potatoes we will harvest before the first frost which is usually around October and Acorn squash are just about done.
- We also planted a row of watermelons just beside the last permanent bed to make use of the space and irrigation water. They are doing well and it looks to be 30+ melons coming out sometime in September.
Over the winter we plan to build more beds. In the picture below you can see the 32’x100’ silage tarp we just laid down to start a process called occultation.
The process uses something like this silage tarp to create a dark and humid environment that kills the vegetation under it. Once the ground is wet the tarp creates a perfect environment to germinate seeds, but because we will not remove the tarp the germinated seeds will expire.
At minimum a few weeks is required, however we will leave this on for the rest of the growing season to kill all of the cover crop and grasses that were in this section. This is in preparation for the winter when we build more permanent beds in this space.
In a perfect market garden world square or rectangular plots are the preference and there are good reasons for doing so. However, with the irregular shape of our plot we need to make the best use of the space we have. We estimate that we will have just under a 1/4 (~10,000 sqft) acre in production, in contrast if we did the largest “standard” plot we could fit we only get 5,000 sqft use.
