Started the day out at Tonopah Rob’s Vegetable Farm helping Rob and Jerry with the Saturday morning Farm Stand where they sell veggies picked during the previous few days. In between chatting and restocking, helping Rob’s mom in the kitchen, and checking out the progress of the farm, Caroline picked up a shovel and helped turn over half of our plot. For my volunteering out on the farm, Rob gave me a 12 foot by 14-foot plot to grow what I wanted to. Besides the garlic which should be done next month and a small row of chard I’m leaving to see if we might get one more cutting from it, the plot has been cleaned. I began sowing seed on September 21st and made my first harvest on October 27 – some radishes and greens are quick to grow. Since that first harvest Caroline and I have enjoyed the following:
- 25.5 lbs of Lettuce
- 10.3 lbs of Radishes
- 18.5 lbs of Carrots
- 10.3 lbs of Spinach
- 17.7 lbs of Cabbage
- 10 lbs of Chard
- 10.5 lbs of Turnips
- 14.5 lbs of Arugula, Bekana, Mizuna (salad greens)
- 2.75 lbs of Beets (crop failure)
- 1.7 lbs of Broccoli
- .75 lbs of Broccoli Greens
- 1.0 lbs of Turnip Greens
- 2.6 lbs of Bekana
- 4.25 lbs of Collard Greens
- 1.6 lbs of Cilantro
- 1.0 lbs of Fenugreek
- .9 lbs of Chervil
- .5 lbs of Chual (a desert southwest green)
Nearly 135 pounds of all-natural veggies came out of our tiny plot! This coming week I’ll be out planting beans. After the garlic is picked and I finish with the beans, that will be it for the season as it is simply too hot over summer to be out working the soil. Over the course of summer I’ll be posting a series of stories on Tonopah Rob’s website detailing what went into my plot, when and how much I harvested, and the shelf life I was getting while storing the haul. Obviously, there were times we couldn’t eat the amount of food picked in a few days. I do hope to take the lessons learned these past six and a half months and apply them at the end of this year to see what kind of yield improvement I can get if I do things better the second time around.