Week 12: Non-stop harvest

Summer bounty in the share room

Last week was one of the most abundant CSA harvests I can remember, but having such an amazing variety of summer crops right now also has a small downside. This time of year it seems like the only thing we do all day is harvest! Harvest starts at 6 am with the leafy vegetables like lettuce, greens, escarole and celery. We begin so early because it's best to harvest these vegetables before the heat of the later morning, when leafy greens are prone to wilting and are less likely to stay fresh. We usually follow greens harvest with root crops like carrots, beets and potatoes. It's best to wait to harvest crops in the cucurbit (summer squash, zucchini, cucumber, watermelon) and solanaceous (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers) families until later morning when the morning dew has had a chance to burn off (both families of crops are susceptible to diseases that are spread under wet conditions).

With cucurbits and tomatoes, we do several successions of crops over the course of the summer, and we always start with harvesting the newest planting first. The oldest plantings inevitably succumb to disease first, but they are generally still harvestable for a few weeks once diseased, albeit with reduced yields. To avoid (or at least slow) the spreading of powdery mildew to our newest summer squash planting, or of early blight to our newest tomatoes, we try not to enter the youngest plantings after we've been in the oldest ones. This also means that we don't do any trellising or weeding in newer plantings after we've harvested from the older plantings.

If we have any time left at the end of the day (which we sometimes don't, especially on Mondays, which is our biggest harvest day), we try to get to other projects like weeding and irrigating our fall crops. This past week we've been trying to use any time left at the end of the day to harvest storage onions. These onions will go in to the greenhouse to cure for a few weeks before we distribute them in the share. In another week or two, we will also start harvesting winter squash, which will also need to cure a few weeks before distribution.

Each week brings a different crop that seems to consume most of our day. Four weeks ago it was Ailsa Craig onions, which require a lot of time to clean off properly. Three weeks ago it seemed like the summer squash/zucchini harvest would never end, as we picked about 1,000 pounds every other day. The summer squash and zucchini plants have slowed down significantly, but last week watermelons and tomatoes replaced them as the most time-consuming harvests. With both crops we've now run up with some other limitations - there isn't enough space in our cooler for all the watermelon, and we don't have enough trays to hold all the tomatoes we've harvested. I suppose that's a pretty good problem to have, though! This week we should still continue to enjoy an abundance of all these crops, but soon the focus of the harvest will be shifting to more fall crops like leeks, storage potatoes, cabbage and winter squash.

What's in the share: Lettuce, Greens, Escarole, Celery, Beets, Carrots, Summer Squash/Zucchini, Cucumbers, Watermelon, Eggplant, Peppers, Red slicing tomatoes, Heirloom tomatoes, Plum Tomatoes, Potatoes, PYO Cherry tomatoes and mini plums, PYO Beans, PYO Herbs, PYO Flowers.
New this week: Orange and yellow watermelon, Danvers Carrots, PYO Husk Cherries.

Ripe PYO tomatoes