Farm Life Vegetables and Berries

Learning to Expect the Unexpected

Travaux de fin de saison - End of Season Fieldwork 1 Travaux de fin de saison - End of Season Fieldwork 2

It’s always when you least expect it that it happens: the brief heat spell we’ve been enjoying is exactly what the vegetable doctor ordered for our rutabagas, our turnips and our lettuce. The weather has indeed been spectacular – the only thing missing is a light rain, just enough to irrigate everything nicely. But we’ve learned to pick our battles and count our blessings, so we take the weather as it comes. We’ll deal with the water issue another day. We’ve emptied several sections of our fields already, as we prepare to sow our cover crops before the cold sets in. Oats and rye are the only ones that can grow fast enough to beat the first hard frosts. And while the oats will not survive the winter cold, the rye will hibernate under the snow, biding its time until spring. It’s a wonderful crop, rye, although planting it now means having to postpone early fieldwork next spring while we watch it grow for a few weeks…