WEEK 16: Winter will come...

Maybe it was that bout of frisky fall-like weather that got us thinking about the cold winter months that lie ahead (or maybe it was the 100lbs of tomatoes sitting on the hay wagon ripening/rotting in the sun...), and preserving the bountiful summer crops made it onto the work board. The weeds have let up a little, and we've gotten pretty efficient with the harvesting, so Wednesday we spent the better part of a day producing 45L of tomato sauce, and this weekend I made peach jam with seconds from the Hamilton Mountain Farmer's market.

Chris and Denise celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary (hurrah!) and left on Thursday for a romantic Stratford getaway (A Winter's Tale, it so happens).
We had harvested everything from the Sargeants on Wednesday for Thursday's markets, so we were way ahead and actually left early to head into town with the truck and trailer loaded. The harvest is kick-ass, by the way: juicy watermelon and cantaloupe and sweeet sweet corn and beautiful long straight english cucumbers and cool stripy beets and purple haze carrots and fine fingerling potatoes and... no room for it all on the market tables!

Friday we hosted a dozen or so teenagers from a YMCA employment camp, and the interns did a pretty decent job at keeping them entertained and informed on our "cycle of the farm" tour of the main attractions here at Manorun (the veggies, the pasture/livestock, the hoophouse, and the compost pile:)
We are conducting an experiment with our young beets: one bed got sprinkled with boron, a micronutrient which our soil is lacking according to previous years' soil sampling (lesson: it's not all about the NPK folks); another bed got a good douse of compost tea. Will they turn out drastically different? Only time will tell...

We picked apples down the street at Myers after work, and Meghan returned refreshed from her week at the cottage right on time for David to take his vacation in New York. Next week we lose Meghan again to her sweet wine testing job, and all the farm daughters go back to school. Times they are a changin'.