Hello Everyone:The crops are mostly harvested as of late Saturday - the snow started just as I was closing up the barn and gates.
What crops are out there are either impervious to the cold or were subject to calculated risk based on a variety of factors.
I'll do the delivery Tuesday and Wednesday as usual, though I may have to deliver the Tuesday evening crops a little early as my National Farmers Union chapter rescheduled its monthly meeting for Tuesday night. I'm assuming mid to late afternoon delivery on Tuesday as of this writing.
The kidney beans will not be ready. That's ok, I will have to do a final round of picking up the last of the totes, so I can drop these off in a ziplock or other receptacle as I have done in past years.
This was by far the toughest harvest I have ever done. It was during a weather check late Thursday that I learned that the "chance of wet flurries or showers" had changed to snow and or rain up to 5-10 cm accumulation. All my scheduled plans for Friday and Saturday went on hold as I tried to figure out what to do and how to do it.
If I left everything to the usual harvest day, there might be an intolerable amount of damage to the crops (or might not, in case the snow changed to rain and then did not freeze). What was a better use of time? A steady hand or work really hard for an event that might or might not occur and in doing so upset my scheduled tasks, which included planting the garlic for next season?
Alternately, if I harvested everything, there was certainly no place to store all of it in a climate moderated place (the nursery is rodent and frost free; the heater can keep the temperature around 4 degrees on its lowest setting). But its space is limited to a few cubic feet, and not all of the shelves are big enough to accommodate the large items such as a basket of chard leaves. .
And if I harvested the leaves (assuming I found another storage spot for them), would they remain fresh until Wednesday or would they wilt?
I spent most of Friday harvesting carrots, all the while brainstorming the possibilities and taking into account all of the snow mitigation that would need to be done around the barn (the barn is a hay barn, that is, it has un-chinked walls to allow stored hay to dry. It is (mostly) rain proof, but snow does blow in and with the high temperatures above zero, this would mean that many items in there would need to be tarped (lawn mower, tiller, etc) or otherwise protected (the curing kidney beans).
What made harvesting the carrots stressful was the knowledge that of all the crops out there, these were probably best left in the ground where the cold would not affect them - even if the snow killed off the tops. However, I also knew that the chance of rain coupled with a high of 5 degrees would make for a miserable if not dangerous harvest. I can work in the cold or the wet but not both. Living off farm and getting a chill would at the very least require coming home to change clothes and warm up - easily loosing an hour of work time during our short days. And the carrots were the most time consuming task at hand.
So my efforts were harried by a constant stream of questions, task lists and the nagging feeling that my priorities were not in the best order.
Saturday morning as I suited up for the day, I had a bit of a brainstorm. I was getting into a second pair of wool over-pants (which smelled tantalizingly of campfire), I recalled that I had found a spare heater stored in the same closet as the camp gear - a spare for the nursery in case the first one broke down.
I packed that in the car for the day, thinking I could place it in the bottom of the ice fridge - the ice having long since melted back in the summer - for a few more cubic feet of storage space.
Arriving at the farm, none of yesterdays questions were resolved and it was chilly. Four layers, including two layers of wool over-pants (Moving about was awkward but at least I was warm.)
I continued to work on snow mitigation in the barn, doing a bit of option exploring to see if I could get a few more cubic feet in the nursery.
When I knew it could no longer wait, I started with the smallest items (a few pounds of beets, then the handful of remaining daikons, the only four cabbages that somehow avoided being chewed up by cabbage loopers...then the kohlrabi, which looked so nice that I thought they should be harvested as it appeared to be one of the best crops out there and so worth saving no matter what...
Julia arrived later that morning and we got to work bagging the carrots as all of the harvest baskets were full and the carrots were taking up three much-needed harvest baskets. These went into the ice fridge along with the leeks.
The last two items were the green onions and lettuce. The onions fit into the nursery, but then there was no room for the lettuce. More options...set them on a table in the barn and heap dozens of row cover loosely over them? If I could sweep the floor of the barn (gravel, straw, grit, and bare earth) that would be acceptable, but between the wind blowing through and the numerous sharp edges around here and straw on the floor, I might wind up with uncovered lettuces overnight and some very tattered row covers.
My final brainstorm suggested the ice compartment of the ice fridge. I unsealed this and heaped the lettuce baskets in there, then sealed it back up again, hoping that the heater would keep then suitably protected. Placing the tightly fitting panels back on the fridge, I felt like I was entombing the lettuce heads!
Physically today, I feel fine but mentally drained and perhaps a little tired from expending energy keeping warm, though really it was only when my hands were wet from washing produce that I felt much chill.
Not a harvest I will soon forget...I just wish we had a photographer there to document our efforts as we harvested the lettuces under a brief band of ice pellets - baskets of lettuce beside us covered with burlap
Details of the harvest on "This weeks harvest" Page.