Planting, Harvesting, Weeding & Seeding
September is one of the busiest months of the year with harvesting, planting and weeding all happening at the same time with sunny days promoting growth.
We are still harvesting off of the summer veggies for the most part and taking lots of notes about what changes we need to make to reach our goals for each crop next year.
The greenhouse is full of trays of seedlings fall veggies while we are direct seeding and transplanting lots in the soil.
All the newly planted fall veggies are growing nicely but with the warm weather it is also helping the weeds grow quickly so we have to get back to lots of weeding.
The harvest of the summer veggies is slowly down but we are getting all of our observations written down about what we want to do next year and how we can improve.
Obviously the weather plays the main factor in when crops ripen but it is good to know when we have to plant on our new property to get a new succession of cherry tomatoes coming in at this time.
Having the plants loaded with cherry tomatoes makes it much easier to harvest and we can reduce how often we are harvesting our earlier successions that have less on them.
Getting the notes now makes it easier for when we are crop planning in December and may not remember all of what we wanted to change.
The greenhouse is constantly staying full with the seedlings we take out to be transplanted being replaced by trays of seeds we are just planting.
Over the next few weeks we will do the majority of our planting for the fall as we have to plant everything early to allow it the more time it needs to grow in the cooler days we will have.
With today being 98 degrees and the days sitting in the high-80s and low-90s we need to give lots of water to our young fall veggies to reduce the stress they have to deal with.
The downside to irrigating them more is that all the weeds are emerging now that there is water for them to germinate. After they germinate they are growing very fast so we have to constantly be weeding all the areas we have planted fall veggies.
We try to use the variety of weeding tools that we have instead of hand weeding as it is quicker and much easier on the body. Unfortunately the weeds love to find the places right around the plants where it is difficult for the tools to reach them so we have to do some hand weeding.
For some of the direct seeded crops like carrots and beets we have to do some hand weeding no matter what to remove the competition and allow them to thrive.
The broccoli and other brassicas start shading out the weeds as they get bigger and as we get into cooler and shorter days the weeds will grow much slower.
