You are invited to the farm this Saturday, October 15, for our annual Pumpkin Patch! Choose your jack-o-lantern, cinderella (rouge vif d’etampes), and pie pumpkins (Winter Luxury) for the upcoming season. The patch will be open from 10 am to 2 pm.
The pumpkin patch this year is on our back hill, with a lovely view of Harkins Slough. They are forecasting rain (perhaps a sizeable rain) on Friday, but it looks like we may be blessed with a brief dry spell on Saturday before rain returns in the evening. The pumpkin patch will likely be a bit muddy, so bring appropriate footwear! We considered postponing, but we need to move all the pumpkins and squash out of that field next week so we can plant cover crops on the hillside. So make it an adventure, bring your raincoats and boots, and enjoy the wet conditions!
Cover crops, for those of you who may be new to the farm, are planted (1) to hold the soil fast during the rainy season, especially on hillsides, (2) to add nitrogen and other nutrients to the soil when they are chopped up and worked into the soil in spring, and (3) to outcompete weeds. We put about 80% of our vegetable growing fields into cover crops (typically a mix of bell beans, peas, and vetch) each winter. The rest is productive through the winter with crops for our less intensive winter season. (See the note below for an updated winter schedule for the coming season.)
A good solid rain will be good for the farm at this point in the season. We’ll be able to plant a lot of our cover crops into moist soil. This is preferable to planting the cover crop seed and then watering it up with sprinklers for a couple reasons. One, of course is the water savings. We try to depend on rainfall to water cover crops and other winter crops as much as possible. The other is that fewer weed seeds come up when we plant to moisture instead of watering up the cover crop. There is always a layer of weed seeds near the soil surface that sprout immediately when a field is watered. These are worked under when we plant the cover crop seed. In moist soil we can also more easily plant the cover crop seed to the correct depth, so we tend to get a nicer stand. So we welcome the rain, as long as it’s not a gulley-washer, and hope that we’ll have a “normal” rainy season ahead of us!
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