Today we went to work harvesting more raspberries. It is amazing how fast these berries ripen; in only a day, there were hundreds more looking red, delicious, and ready for picking. Raspberries are tricky to harvest; they like to hide underneath the bush's leaves- According to Rich, this is basically a defense mechanism for the plant against birds who may want to eat their berries. Crouching down is a necessity if you want to find all of the juicy, ripe, amazing, purple-y, mouthwatering, well you get the picture I think, berries.
I have realized that peas are my favorite plant to harvest. Pea plants are awesome because of several different reasons-
1. Pea plants are really interesting looking. Their strange leaf shape and stem structure has always reminded me of the physique of a praying mantis (!).
2. It is amazing how much produce you can get from a small number of plants.
The Mammoth Melting Sugar Pea plants at City Farm are so abundant with pods. I could hardly even spot any of the pods when first harvesting these plants, but they have become easier to find with the more I work with them.
These plants in particular are filling in amazingly, so it is especially hard to find the hiding pods that are in the dense, chaotic greenery. I have found that lightly swaying the top of the plant (be careful not to hurt it) and looking for swinging pods works well.
I realized the other day that I am learning a lot of valuable information by just being at the farm and noticing how everything changes day to day. Recently I noticed that each pea pod starts as the center of a flower and gradually grows out of the flower, shedding petals and forming seeds. I had never realized this...
We also staked the tomato plants today. Rich uses vertical stakes placed on each corner of the bed and along the sides every couple of yards. Tying a string from stake to stake along the bed, he created a "ladder" for the plants to climb.
Tomato plants are interesting because they don't look like vines, but they grow in the same fashion. It's important to stake these plants because ripe tomatoes weigh so much that the stems may break before harvest. Using strips of t-shirts, we tied the tomato plants to the nearest string, being careful not to strangle the plant
We also went to work doing some pruning to the tomatoes, breaking off the small shoots, or "suckers", that grow in between large stems. Rich is always speaking about the expenditure of energy in plants; by breaking off the suckers, the plant will use more of its energy to produce the tomatoes rather than growing new stems.
Right now, the cherry tomatoes are about the size of a marble and totally green. It should be a couple more weeks until they are ready for the picking. I can't wait-- tomatoes are definitely in my top five of produce.
No comments:
Post a Comment