Last week I gave a workshop on late fall, winter and early spring vegetables for some of the growers for the Local Food Hub in Charlottesville, VA. The goal was to help local growers of sustainable produce to grow more vegetables for late fall, during the winter, and again in early spring, so that Local Food Hub can supply this good food to more people locally. Here’s a pdf of the slideshow I presented. We also had worksheets for the five priority focus crops they had chosen: bunched carrots, bunched beets, romaine lettuce, spinach and cooking greens (kale, collards, chard and Asian greens). I enjoyed meeting the other growers and came away with some ideas myself.
<iframe src=”http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/35667593″ width=”427″ height=”356″ frameborder=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ scrolling=”no” style=”border:1px solid #CCC; border-width:1px 1px 0; margin-bottom:5px; max-width: 100%;” allowfullscreen> </iframe> <div style=”margin-bottom:5px”> <strong> <a href=”https://www.slideshare.net/SustainableMarketFarming/production-of-late-fall-winter-and-early-spring-vegetable-crops” title=”Production of late fall, winter and early spring vegetable crops” target=”_blank”>Production of late fall, winter and early spring vegetable crops</a> </strong> from <strong><a href=”http://www.slideshare.net/SustainableMarketFarming” target=”_blank”>Pam Dawling</a></strong> </div>
I’ve started to take bookings for fall workshops. So far, this is where I’ll be:
Heritage Harvest Festival, Monticello, near Charlottesville. Friday September 12, 9-10am Growing and Storing Cold-Hardy Winter Vegetables
Mother Earth News Fair, Seven Springs, PA. Saturday and Sunday September 13-14, times to be decided
Crop Rotations for Vegetables and Cover Crops
Crop Planning for Sustainable Vegetable Production
Meanwhile, at home in our gardens, we’ve been dodging big rainfalls to get our garlic harvested. Not as much as last year – we lost quite a lot to the cold wet winter weather. But what we have got is now hanging in netting in our barn to dry and cure for a few weeks.
Also on our “very pressing” list of things to do is to cut our seed potatoes and get them planted. I wrote previously about our June potato planting. Most of the garden looks very good. I’m especially noticing that our recent corn planting has few weeds – it was last year’s watermelon patch and had the biodegradable plastic mulch. I had heard other growers say the biodegradable mulch reduced weeds in future years. It’s very gratifying to see that with my own eyes. We are uncovering various cucurbits that are now flowering, so that the pollinators can get o work. (We had them covered to protect the small plants from striped cucumber beetles.) The watermelons look pretty good. the second cucumbers were full of weeds, but we are working our way along the row.
Many of the raised beds look very weedy, but nothing a big round of rototilling won’t fix! Our nine pea beds need to go. It’s a happy bit of timing that our first green beans are ready as soon as the peas give up! That way we don’t have to pick both at once.
Talking of weeds, I enjoyed a recent post by Margaret Roach on her blog A Way to Garden. In particular she mentions mugwort, which we have as an escapee from a previous deliberate planting. She also has a nice photo of galinsoga, one of our worst summer weeds in the raised beds, and links to various other weedy pages.
