Fall Harvest 2022

The days and nights are getting colder, but that does not mean the end of the season for fresh produce. While the tomatoes and pepper plants slow down, some of our other favorites start to come into their own, including leafy greens like spinach, arugula, and lettuce. You’ll be able to find these greens, along with carrots, beets, scallions, and leeks in the farm store this fall. One of my favorite fall dishes is an arugula salad with roasted beets and goat cheese.

The beauty of a diversified garden is that every plant has different needs and different seasons in which they thrive. The aforementioned tomatoes and peppers are fruit and therefore the plants take a long time to produce the thing we want to eat (the actual tomato as opposed to the stem or leaf or flower). They require a long season and lots of care to keep the plants upright and healthy for that period.

So as we move into fall, these plants are a bit depleted and the cooler weather makes their job of producing and ripening fruit even harder. On the other hand we have leafy greens - the salad lover’s favorite. We eat the leaves of these plants (often baby leaves), so it makes sense that these plants take a lot less time to reach harvest. They also tend to be easier to grow in the fall, as warm weather can cause these plants to bolt, which means they are responding to a stressful environment by attempting to reproduce and continue the lifecycle. You can tell a plant is bolting when it sends up a flower stalk and as the plant puts its energy into the flower and seeds, the leaves turn tough and bitter. It is not impossible to grow greens like lettuce, spinach, and arugula in the summer, but it is more difficult.

So be sure to take advantage of the last tomatoes and the fall greens, which get sweeter as the weather gets cooler.