Germinating seeds in the soil while it is 100 degrees

Germinating seeds directly in the soil in the field is much more challenging than in the greenhouse even before you add the fact of 100 degree days.

The soil in the field needs to be kept watered well for the seed to germinate which is hard to control with the sun, hot weather and wind we get.

While germinating the delicate seeds are irrigated with sprinklers every day to keep the soil soaked and help their first roots survive the stress of the hot weather.

Poking through the brown soil we saw little specks of green from the arugula seeds germinating Monday. Arugula grows so quickly in all stages of its life and the first of the fall always has a little more spiciness as a result of the hotter weather it is growing in.

It will be at the end of this month when we start to harvest these fall veggies and add them to the summer crops we are still harvesting in good amounts.

Getting starting on seeding and planting the fall veggies in the field now is vital so that we can have veggies to harvest all winter long. As the days get cooler and there are fewer hours of sun the plants will grow much slower meaning it takes much longer from when they go in the ground until we harvest them.

That leaves the tricky situation of balancing harvesting all the summer veggies and planting for the fall and winter which need more attention due to the stressful conditions they are starting in.

While many of our summer crops are starting to slow down, we have a new plantings of heirlooms and cherry tomatoes to start picking.

Each year we plant a few rows of heirlooms very late in an attempt to have new plants producing tomatoes in September and October when the other plantings are getting tired.

It does not always work as last year there were no tomatoes on the plants due to the heat waves that killed the flowers.

This year’s much cooler temperatures have meant that the plants have a good amount of tomatoes on them and we will start harvesting them in the next two weeks. We will continue harvesting them into late October until it gets too cool and they can’t really ripen.

In the past years we have done one really early planting of sungolds and then three plantings of everything but this year we added a fourth one.

The only way we could make that happen is with our new property we started leasing this year in Dixon. We have two very long rows of cherry tomatoes over there and we are starting to harvest the sungolds.

The juliets are a few days behind and then the other varieties in a week or more.

It is very interesting to compare the different micro climates that each of our properties we lease has and learn how we can best utilize the two we grow veggies on to have the longest and most productive season.

The cherry tomatoes have been the biggest success of the new property as we have been learning a whole lot about the land and how best we can grow veggies on it.

We’ve already spent lots of time thinking about what changes we will do for next year and we are continuing to gather the necessary equipment to help the veggies flourish over there.