We are gearing up for the worst ice storm in 25 years here in the Carolinas. We are expecting up to an inch of ice accumulation, primarily freezing rain. This will be followed by a week of freezing weather, with lows in the teens and highs in the 30s.

🌱 Shoutout to leeks for always being there for you! Most dependable late winter crop for us. I didn’t start these until late august, but they sized up ok.

🌱 Purple top turnip that must have gotten into my cover crop mix. I expected it to be hollow inside, but it was solid and perfectly white all the way through, and roasted up beautifully. Definitely growing some next winter!

Absolutely bizarre series of events this week so far. Mixture of very good and bad. Can’t get into the bad right now, but today is my daughter’s first day at school, so we’re celebrating!

Rye sown 11/29, 5 weeks later. Planted very dense for quick weed suppression. I’ve been a bit quiet here, but already starting transplants for a February planting. Aiming for earlier cash flow by doing wholesale. Also sickened about this country’s future, but hey, there’s nothing new under the sun.

Today my daughter helped me plant sprouting broccoli, and then we biked 11 miles to get a brownie.

Garleek clumps were pulled, divided, and transplanted into a dedicated bed. This will be my first bed with a perennial crop, tho I’ll have to wait another 10+ months for my first harvest. Should be interesting to see how it goes! I’m interested in interplanting summer cover crops or cash crops too.

After doing a bit of research I found a rye variety that’s supposed to have an early maturity, ‘Florida 401’. I used this for all my late-sown plots. Early maturity will hopefully allow a wider window between termination and transplanting cash crops, reducing allelopathic compounds from the rye.

Is “Baby it’s Cold Outside” about a repressed or empowered woman? In this Instagram comment section I will rehash the same arguments I’ve seen other people making for the last ~9 years.

We had a low of 17F (-8C?) last night. Collards look unbothered, but sprouts maybe suffered a little damage. Really want to sell these, but I suppose I’ll have to harvest, blanch, and freeze several gallons if they’re toast 😂

This post finds me hiding in the bathroom after a very long holiday market.

Early spring crops don’t have time for a cover crop before sowing, so I’m chipping the paths and tarping this winter. The tarps primarily prevent denitrification from our heavy winter rains, and woodchips primarily get us out of the muck.

🌱 Forever starting fall crops three weeks late, and spring crops three weeks early.

A yellow-fleshed turnip with red anthocyanins in the flesh. It's one of my breeding goals in turnips and this is the first year I'm actually seeing this combination in my breeding population.

After doing some more research this fall, I don’t think I’ll be using crimson clover as a cool season cover crop again, unless I plant it very late in the season. It apparently increases root knot nematode populations more than any other cool season cover crop.

Working in the home garden on Thanksgiving morning… I can smell the restaurant across the road roasting turkeys. I can hear the neighbor yelling “Git yo azz out here!” and the clanking of pots. About to run out and snag a tree. Grateful for good food, friends, and tolerable extended family!

🌱 We’re going on 9 weeks of harvesting this sprouting broccoli now (Happy Rich F1). It hasn’t yielded well most weeks due to drought and being shaded out in the early season. But I harvested 20 lbs this week from our 50 ft row, and it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down!

From now through December 2nd, take 20% off all seeds (including bulk sizes!) when checking out from plantgoodseed.com with discount code “HOLIYAYSEEDS” This sale runs through December 2nd. #🌱 #plantillustration

🌱 This ‘Eruption’ from Uprising Organics. Very upright habitat that I like, fewer bugs hiding in the leaves it seems. Heads are a little loose, but otherwise they look just flawless.

The primary restaurant that buys our produce, Topsoil, recently received a Michelin recommendation! Topsoil is really committed to the farm-to-table model, growing their own produce and buying as much locally as they can. Here are a couple items they made with our pumpkins and beets recently.

Y’all follow @klausbrugger.bsky.social in case he decides to start posting on Bluesky. Incredible amateur plant breeder working with squash, radishes, tomatoes, and probably more I’m forgetting.

🌱🌶️ Enjoyers of red chili pepper flakes, does this look like the right ratio of seeds to flakes? I sifted out a lot of seeds, considering adding some back in though.

🌱 The red cabbage couldn’t handle a 23F low, but the one green cabbage that got mixed in looks perfectly healthy! At least I’ll get one cabbage this year 😂

Sorghum cover crop to serve as a mulch for garlic beds. Probably should have used buckwheat given our cooler temps, but I hoped this would be resistant to nematode (this variety isn’t, sadly). A few weeds here and there, so I’m tarping for a couple more weeks before I plant garlic.

Life updates: baby Robin arrived, and our firstborn has a fractured leg. It’s been a crazy couple weeks here 😅

New mullein variety: Purple Throated / Nettle Leaved (Verbascum chaxii). This one had been kicking around in the planting stock for awhile, waiting for regeneration. We started regrows in both the Ojai seed production zones last year. Now it’s ready! www.plantgoodseed.com/products/pur... #🌱

🌱 This is just your reminder that Sweet Garleek overwinters beautifully and can be perennialized. - Sow in late summer - Harvest next spring by cutting at ground level - It sends up new growth, then dies in the summer - Several new shoots come up in the fall - Selectively harvest from each bunch

40 degree temp swing tonight, bit wild for our area. Then tomorrow the first hard freeze arrives with lows around 24F. No easing into winter this year!

- Broadcast a cover crop in the fall - Apply a thin layer (~0.8 yds/100') in germination and increase biomass - Crimp in the spring. It’s my favorite no-till method for managing permanent beds in the off-season, and can easily scale with the right attachment for a tractor.

It was a crazy amount of work this year, but the fall garden is looking so good right now. First hard frost coming next week, can’t wait for candy carrots.

Tried both a hybrid (Dragon) and an OP (Fino) fennel for the fall. They look incredible, but both suffered from sunburn as transplants, and I only had about 10% survival. May experiment with direct seeding next year.

🌱 I originally transplanted my leeks into trenches made in a fresh layer of compost. These two photos are the before/after of using a hoe to hill them up. Pretty smooth process! I think I’d grow alliums and collards as my only winter crops if I could.

Catching rays

🌱 Mantanghong radish looking great! I learned recently (from someone on here?) peeling the outer layer removes the peppery part. Even my daughter will eat them that way!

🌱🌶️ The hybrid pepper I bred is almost ripe! This was a cross between a yellow and a red pepper. The ‘y’ gene that gives peppers their yellow color is a recessive trait, so the F1 hybrids are red, and yellow fruit won’t show up until the second generation.

🌱 Pulled the rest of the sweet potatoes today due to the cool nights. Variety is Covington, selected for its nematode resistance. Also plenty tasty! We planted these slips into beds with several inches of composted woodchips on top. Very easy harvest, with clean tubers.

How many times do I have to tell you that we are not going to solve any food crises by growing bougie lettuce indoors.

🌱 It’s not easy growing great lettuce in our climate in the spring, but our fall-planted butterheads are thriving! Next year I’m hoping to trial shade cloth to help us grow the rest of the season.

🌱 Possibly our last batch of bouquets for the season dropped off at our local coffee shop. Love these colors! I post mostly about the veg side, but the flowers are vital to our market garden.

Feeling a bit of burnout setting in, but this week should be the last of the busy season. 20 new 100’ beds broadforked. Half of them cover cropped already. Clearing lots 1 by 1 at home, transitioning to overwintered flowers or cover crops. Ready for baby boy to arrive and a slower, sleepless pace 😂

🌱 Tea bush seed pod, camelia sinensis. This is the first year my one little bush has begun producing seed. Time to scale up!

Whether building with wood is better or not depends entirely on whether there are idiots in the forest.

🌱 The best day? Sources say ‘Yes’.

🌱 Here’s one of the tropical pumpkin hybrids I bred last year. It was easy to grow, productive and very early. I harvested this one just 78 days after transplanting. It’s also delicious – incredibly sweet and nice balance of floral and savory notes.

One lesson I learned this year that I didn’t want to be true: hybrid squash always* out-perform OP squash when significant stress is applied. I want to develop OP squash that thrive here, but it really seems like F1 hybrids or genetically diverse “landraces” are the most resilient.

🌱 Sweet potatoes still averaging small thanks to our groundhogs and rabbit (our tabby got the rabbit). They grow slower with cooler temps, but I’ll push them another week or so.

Onions - Direct-sown - Overwintered - Open field Research suggests this is very possible here, though it goes against local convention. Spring flooding is a risk too. Now I just need to wait until next June to find out if this will work.

🌱 Rounding out my favorite hot peppers this year, I love the flavor of these Syrian Goat Horn peppers from Commonwealth Seeds. They’re very sweet with a nice kick of heat. Well-suited to dry climates, but tends to wilt in rainy weather like most other hot peppers this year. Another breeding project?

Growing a quick cover crop that will serve as a mulch for our garlic. Either the frost will kill it or we’ll tarp it in one month. 

Not generally a fan of 3D printing houses, but this is where it starts to make sense. From artist Ronald Rael, this building has 12" thick adobe walls. Temperature passively modulated quite effectively in a climate with wild diurnal temperature swings.