Thursday October 28, 2010

Heirloom Breeds & Seeds:
The First Hundred Pounds of Garlic

Hello Farm Girl Farmers.

Inch by inch and row by row! As I mentioned in an email to all of you earlier today, we have had a steady garlic effort going—over the weekend Robin Perry, Emily Paskus, Beth Domaney, Melissa Brown, Andrei Vankov and Jamie Goldenberg took to the field and got the first hundred pounds of garlic in the ground. Today we had more help from Cindy Elitzer and later this week we have Liz Hogan on deck. Go team!

I should not neglect to mention that the garlic seed we are planting was prepared for planting (broken from heads down into cloves, a daunting job in itself) by a cheerful group of birthday revelers last week at Allium Restaurant. FGFers Brian Thayer, Sara Parrilli, Sarah Volkman, Greenagers Director Will Conklin (who brought us the help of the teenaged greenagers this summer) and various and sundry friends gathered around Vivian to celebrate her special day and made quick work of the garlic break-down, in addition to making a beautiful mess of garlic skin and soil all over the floor of Allium. Very special thanks to Troy Kinser, manager of Allium and Nancy Thomas, owner, for putting their money where their Farm to Table mission is.

We’ll keep planting garlic over the next couple of weeks, a great time to put in a few row feet is during regular pick-up hours on Tuesday or Saturday. We can also arrange for you to come and plant at other points in the week, so be in touch! Its easy and satisfying.

In my latest last year-this year-next year musings, I am noticing that it has been steadily colder this year than it was last year at this time. Last year at this time we still had a trickle of the summer crops like peppers and summer squash and this year those crops are long gone with the frost. But we’re hedging our bets…we’ve put protective row cover (that’s the white fabric you see out in the field) on several beds so that if we do get some milder weather, as we did last year towards the end of October, we won’t have given everything up to the tyranny of the cold nights. Under row cover, with the nights being as cold as they have been, things like baby arugula and bok choi aren’t growing, per se, but they are holding steady, not freezing to death either. So if things get more temperate, they’ll still have a chance to size up.

Finally, another reminder that we will distribute veggies through the first week of November: Tuesday November 2 and Saturday November 6. That means two more weeks of vegetables after this week’s pick-up.

Enjoy the veggies and the beautiful light at this time of the year.

--Laura Meister, Farm Girl Farmer