C.S.A. Week 12 September 11th/12th

Our big fall jobs are being ticked off one by one. Monday we pulled all of the tomatoes from the greenhouse to make room for our winter greens. The tomatoes plants give us a lot of “green matter”, an essential element to creating a hot compost pile, so pulling these is always closely followed by the building of our yearly compost pile. The green matter gets chopped up and layered in with a years worth of horse and sheep manure, bedding, wood ash, and minerals. As the green tomato vines decompose they really help get the compost temperature up high. We will monitor the pile to document that it hits over 135 degrees for 3 consecutive days, we will then turn it, and repeat 2 more times. This is in accordance with organic standards, the temperature and time requirement to make sure all potential harmful pathogens are killed. With our pile built, today we forked in last year’s compost and fertilizer into the empty tomato beds and replanted them to spinach and kale. We will, with fingers crossed, harvest fresh greens out of the tunnel into February. We did set up a time lapse camera in the tunnel as we were ripping out tomatoes, but found out 3 hours later it only recorded for 10 seconds. Anyway, it would have looked pretty cool.

In the Share:

• Colored Sweet Peppers

• Eggplant

• Bibb Lettuce

• Red Round Radishes

• Tomatoes

• Cherry Tomatoes

• Butternut Squash

• Cipollini Onions