Little to Harvest…..

It seems that we are at that point in the season, between summer and fall, where our production level is at an all time low for the season.  We worry about having enough diversity in our CSA boxes over the next few weeks because we don’t want our CSA members to go hungry! 
Our plan was to harvest cilantro, beets, melons and beans these next couple weeks.  Some critter (probably a groundhog) ate all the melons in the field.  The drought has caused our beans to be small and the beans have been severely damaged by the bean beetles.  The cilantro and beets were overtaken by weeds and are also suffering from not having enough water for them to grow and flourish. We are irrigating every night but our only working pump does not have enough hp or head lift to run a multiple  irrigation lines each night, so we are rotating the areas we irrigate but none of the growing areas are getting the water they would like to flourish. 
We are not irrigating our cut flowers and they are looking very sad with small flower heads and wilted leaves.  We don’t have an extra day of the week for irrigating the flowers because after all we, nor the CSA, can eat flowers!   It is sad that we are unable to give our flowers any water but we are certainly praying for rain every night! 
ON the bright side…. Because of the deer fence, we harvested over 1000 butternut and acorn squash for the CSA. 
Some ideas we have tossed around for next year include trying to transplant beets for this period to prevent the overtaking of weeds and plant a later succession of greenhouse cucumbers.