Harvesting carrots, spinach and olives

Once the weather starts to cool down a little bit everyone starts to ask when we will start harvesting our carrots and we now have an exact answer to that question.

We are starting to harvest our Nantes carrots today and hopefully should have a continuous supply all winter long.

In addition to the carrots, we will begin harvesting spinach for this Saturday’s farmers market.

Even though we plant the first carrots of the fall at the same time as the turnips and radishes they take much longer to germinate and grow to the size we prefer harvesting them at.

They are more of a full-size carrot but not thin like the commercial varieties and sweet and juicy.

In the last two weeks the carrots have sized up with the nice weather we have combined with more than 2.5 inches of rain on the farm in the last week.

At all stages in their growth carrots want the soil to be wet and rain water does the best job for that.

Despite the nice Fall weather we have had this year compared to last year it still has been challenging direct seeding spinach. The beds end up more sparsely populated than we aim for and it grows slower than expected at the start.

The seeds that do germinate grow some really nice leaves that are very flavorful and larger than most spinach.

We just pick off the leaves from the plants instead of harvesting the entire plants which would mean we would have to be continuously planting and have a much larger area devoted for spinach.

Next week there will be a special Wednesday Davis Farmers Market the day before Thanksgiving. It will have extended hours from 12-5 pm in Central Park and there will be some of the farms that only come on Saturdays there also.

Yesterday we enjoyed the gorgeous weather and harvested the first olives of the season. It was a very good harvest although many of the trees we will be harvesting in the coming weeks are very light on olives.

Many farmers in the area are having much lower yields this year and there is no consensus on what is causing it. Olive trees are alternate bearing but the lower yield this year is much larger than it should be.

To harvest the olives we lay down nets around the trees and then use poles to knock the branches so that the olives fall onto the nets.

This morning the olives were milled on the farm and put in a settling tank to separate out some of the particulates that remain after a centrifuge has separately almost all the olive oil from the mash.

Early in the season most of the olives are green which means they have more polyphenols and are more peppery than the later harvest.

We are so lucky that we have a mill on the farm with the olives and that we can do small batches instead of what most farmers have to do which is hire a big crew to harvest everything in one day as they only have one time slot at a large olive mill.

The plan is to have the first of the 2025 olive oil at the farmers market Saturday December 6.