Jan 20, 2025
Brae Farm Harvest Notes January 20, 2025
The various basils are putting on a lot of growth, and we can start doing a larger harvest every couple of weeks.
We'll have our first small harvest of Lebanese cucumbers next week. We'll aim to pick them small. The lemon cucumbers are also coming on.
There will be a few big slicing tomatoes, and a larger quantity of cherry tomatoes.
We'll have an abundance of zucchini flowers, and plenty of early long and diamond eggplants. There are a handful of caspers also starting to size up.
We'll be harvesting from two over-lapping successions of simba beans next week, a slightly larger quantity is expected. The first planting of Mal's beans looks like slowing down a bit now.
There are lots of plums ripening. The mariposa and ruby blood trees are heavily laden with very nice table-quality fruit. We also still have one or two boxes of santa rosa left to pick.
The mulberries continue to produce well. There is enough nice fruit for a daily pick on service days, and I think it would be best to do the larger harvest as early in the week as possible, to avoid wastage - Monday or Tuesday.
Every week I predict we're at the end of the avocados, and then Jesse discovers another 20-30 hiding at the top of the trees. We should do one more harvest, and there's currently around 40 unripe avocados in the shed, including a couple of absolute giants from the bacon variety.
We're not finding many table-quality strawberries now. It's still worth doing one big pick during the week, but perhaps not daily harvests.
The ice plant has been picked very hard over the past two weeks, and there isn't enough there to sustain such large harvests. We can only manage a maximum of about one white basket per week.
The agretti is finishing up and running to seed. We should be able to find enough good tip sprigs for around one more week.
Jodie Lawson - Brae Head Gardener