Summer is a very busy time of year for farmers. Every task that can possibly be done needs to be done twice as frequently as usual. And of course, done in sweltering heat. Even so, we manage to get into a routine during the summer months between planting, harvesting, and selling. Here’s a “week in the life” of a small market farm!
Monday-Wednesday: Field Work
For us, Monday-Wednesday is when we get most of our “field work” done. This is basically any task that isn’t harvesting, packing, or selling our produce. There are lots of different tasks that make it onto our task list week to week. But generally, we have some seeds to start and some transplants to set out into beds each week.
Starting seeds in the summer for us is generally light work – we end up sowing a few trays of lettuce or the odd herb, and eventually our fall cabbages and broccoli. We also direct sow some seeds into the garden each week. Using our Jang seeder, this tends to be a pretty quick process as well.
On the other hand, transplanting can be quite time-consuming. By summer, we’re usually transplanting things into garden beds that have already seen a crop in the spring. If those beds haven’t been properly cleaned up, we have to do that before we can transplant. Once the beds are prepped, getting hundreds of seedlings into the ground also takes some time!
There are also weekly tasks like trellising and pruning our tomatoes and cucumbers, weeding (so much weeding), moving around tarps, mowing the grass, and cleaning up. We typically end up doing these every week.
Finally, we do still harvest some things during the first part of the week! Some produce, like raspberries, cucumbers, and squash, needs to be harvested pretty much every day. Other things, like snap peas, green beans, and tomatoes, must be harvested more than once per week. We usually do that harvest on Mondays.
This season, we also do a Farmer’s Market on Tuesdays, which limits our time for all of the above, phew! In all, it’s quite a list of things to do, and that’s only Monday-Wednesday!!
Thursday Is For Harvest
Thursday is plain and simple: we harvest. In the summer, harvest is truly a full workday (sometimes we don’t even finish in a day). This is far and away the most important day in our week. There isn’t much time for delays or taking our time – we are usually extremely focused and efficient to make sure that we can get our main harvest done.
The majority of our crops are only harvested on Thursdays. We harvest for all of our sales outlets (CSA, farmer’s market, restaurant customers) that same day. Generally, everything that can be harvested will be!
We have a particular process for harvesting, generally starting from the most tender crops to the least tender. This means we begin with our leafy greens like spinach, arugula, lettuce, and romaine. We then move on to the more delicate roots and more robust greens like kale, radishes, and turnips. Then other more substantial crops like beets, carrots, cabbage, etc.
We hope to have those more tender crops harvested as early as possible, so that the heat of the day doesn’t result in storage and flavor problems. In the afternoon, we are generally harvesting squash, beans, peppers, tomatoes, and the like. These crops won’t be bothered too much by being harvested in the heat of the day. We don’t mind either – if you’ve ever eaten a sun-warmed cherry tomato off the vine, you know what I mean!
Friday-Saturday: Selling
If the harvest is done on Thursday, that means that Friday and Saturday we do most of our selling! We deliver our CSA and restaurant goods on Friday, often after spending the morning doing some leftover harvest tasks.
Saturdays are another Farmer’s Market day. We will usually spend the afternoons on Saturday doing some final cleaning up tasks around the farm, like cleaning our storage bins and organizing our space for the following week.
Fridays and Saturdays are not so physically demanding, but both delivering CSAs and especially the Farmer’s Market really demand a fresh mind, so we try to make sure we are fairly well rested for those days.
Sunday: Rest (Usually)
In the summer, we could easily work 7 days a week. While it’s tempting to do so, we strongly prioritize taking one day off per week, and that day is almost always Sunday. We will still do our chores like watering seedlings and a quick farm walk to make sure there aren’t any emergencies, but that’s usually all we do.
If we don’t take at least one day off, the season tends to get very challenging, and burnout can set in. When we get a full day away from the farm, we usually return excited and ready for the next week!
The weeks can get overwhelming in summer, but the routine and diversity of tasks are part of what we absolutely love about farming!