September 19, 2024
This past week has felt a bit more like mid-August than mid-September, but with those warm temperatures we’ve been able to continue harvesting some of your summer favorites like sweet corn, tomatoes, green beans, strawberries. We were even able to get some more chub cucumbers!
Although the temperatures have been warm, each day is getting significantly shorter in terms of daylight. This means that it takes crops a bit longer to mature, so crops like zucchini that we were harvesting every day are now being harvested every other day or every third day depending on temperatures.
While there’s no sign of Jack Frost in the forecast, we know that can change at the drop of a hat. We’ll count our blessings and enjoy the tail end of summer harvest season.
Fall Harvest - here we go!
Not only are we still navigating the summer harvest, but fall harvest is in full swing as well. The orchard crew is busy picking apples daily, now harvesting the ever so popular Honeycrisp. After Honeycrisp, we’ll move onto a few varieties like Fireside and Sweet 16 followed by Haralson and Snowsweet to wrap up the 2024 apple harvest.
The great pumpkin and squash harvest is underway as well. Our parking lot in Waverly has turned into a beautiful sea of fall décor as we stage all of our fall items before they are organized and sorted prior to being shipped out to our customers.
We are predicting that our fall pumpkin harvest will end a bit earlier than normal this year due to lower-than-normal yields and some crop failures, all relating back to the extremely wet spring we had this year. While we did our best to replant what we could, it was an uphill battle for most of our fall crops with an overall wet growing season.
Though the weather is still nice and we want to make the harvest last forever, we’ll start to decide within the next week on which crops to keep harvesting and which crops we’ll start to say goodbye to until next year. It’s always a hard decision, but we know the growing season is coming to an end. Within the next 4-6 weeks, everything that was once producing luscious fruits and vegetables will be but a memory of the 2024 growing season. It will then be onto the field corn and soybean harvest.
A New Vibe at our Garden Centers
If you’ve been out and about, our Garden Centers have made the transition from summer to fall. They are stocked with beautiful mums, colorful pumpkins, gourds, straw bales, corn stalks, and other great fall décor.
While we haven’t had many fall-like days, we are ready when they do arrive. We’ve got everything you need to make your home look and smell like fall.
- Mums and pumpkins to spruce up the outside
- Apples for a fresh batch of homemade applesauce or a homemade apple pie
- Multiple varieties of squash for those cool fall evenings
We’re not wishing summer away, but we like to think of it as easing into fall with a gradual transition.
So, enjoy these final few weeks of summer goodness, but sprinkle in the deliciousness of what fall has to offer. That smell of a fresh batch of applesauce cooking away while watching Sunday football is pretty enjoyable.
