September Newsletter

Market Garden Updates

After the intense heat earlier this week, we’re happy that fall has officially landed. Our crop walk this week showed us a lot of things telling us that our farming season is coming to an end. Most of our zucchini crop was completely overtaken by downy mildew (an inevitability each year), so we removed the lion’s share of our crop. We also pulled in the last of our watermelon for the season. Our basil is coming out soon, and we are beginning to roll up some of our irrigation. 

Root crops and fall greens are in their prime. The fall greens are overflowing- we literally don’t know if we’re going to be able to keep up with the harvest!

Does it get any more fall than picking apples together? Last week we began the harvest of our apples, we’ll sort the apples into “firsts” and “seconds”. The firsts will go into CSA boxes and be eaten as is. The seconds will get saved for our apple cider party later this Fall. At the party we’ll start a big bon fire, press our apples into cider and play with our Tennessee Dancing Gourds that we’ve been growing all season. We’re excited!

Due to Minnesota’s growing season we get two opportunities to plant cool season crops. In the spring we grew Daikon radishes and now that the summer heat has subsided, we were able to grow yet another fall crop!