Seeding fall veggies & a new cherry tomato

All the summer veggies are demanding our attention 24/7 to harvest them, but we can’t devote every second to them as we prepare for the fall and winter.

While we work on what we are harvesting now we are also looking ahead to what we need to harvest this fall and winter which means we need to start seeding those cool season veggies.

Yesterday we seeded the first succession of kale, chard, collards and lettuce for the fall. We will seed more fall veggies tomorrow.

Just three weeks ago we mowed down our spring planted greens so there isn’t too much of a break before we have to focus on these new greens.

It won’t be until mid-August when we plant these greens which gives us a little bit of time to prepare the area we are planting them in.

To prepare the soil in the summer we do have to irrigate it for a little bit as it becomes very hard and difficult to work in without irrigation. Watering before we transplant also helps the veggies have a little less stress when they go into the soil.

For the next three months we will be seeding in the greenhouse all of our fall and winter veggies every week. Some weeks it will be a lot and other weeks it will just be a handful trays of lettuce.

The fall veggies that we direct seed like carrots, spinach and turnips will wait until late-August before we seed them. The spinach we will likely wait even longer since it needs cooler temperatures to germinate and the hot weather last fall meant we had very little spinach over the winter.

We are still devoting most of our time to harvesting the summer deliciousness there is on the farm and the season will be going strong for at least two more months.

The later planted successions will be what we are harvesting the majority off of and for some crops the first plantings that are almost done being harvested will be mowed in to prepare for fall planting.

Even the first tomatoes we planted in March will continue to produce into October although at a lower amount so we will harvest them but not be reliant on them.

Last week we mentioned we are trying a new variety of yellow tomato and it isn’t the only new tomato variety we are trialing as we are seeing how the Queen Bee cherry tomato does.

It is a pink round cherry tomato with yellow and pink stripes that we have been adding to our mixed pints.

The color is different than the other varieties we include in the mix although it looks similar to the purple and yellow bumble bee we have been growing.

Queen Bee is producing a lot right now so we might have some single variety baskets of it at market in addition to being in the mixed pints.