From the Fields - Chris Jergenson

By Chris Jergenson, Merced and Stanislaus counties organic farmer

We are in the middle of harvesting sweet potatoes. We hope to be done by the first week of November. I just started into my Japanese variety, and the yield looks good. I wouldn’t say it’s a huge bumper crop, but I can’t complain.

I also planted a newer variety—an orange skin, orange flesh potato. It’s called 1381. The yield on that was not great. The quality is exceptional. It’s not like a Covington, which is a great yielder. That’s the one I usually plant, but I wanted to try out this new variety. It has a double skin, so it doesn’t get as scratched coming up the harvester. It’s a really pretty potato—perfect shape, perfect size. But I don’t think I’m going to grow it anymore.

With almonds, we finished harvest at the end of August. Since then, we’ve been taking care of weeds. I use a flame thrower-style burner to burn the weeds. Irrigation season just finished last week. We are spreading compost. Then we’ll hit them with an organic copper spray once the trees lose a little more leaves and are about to go dormant.

With peaches, my last irrigation was about two weeks ago. We’re spreading organic chicken compost. We don’t have to worry about weeds and floor sanitation as much, so we’ve been mowing and disking the rows. We topped the trees after harvest to give a little more vigor to the lower branches and help with the pruning process. We’ll also do a copper spray, and then we’ll start pruning.

With this cold weather that we have coming in the next couple weeks, that’ll start putting the trees to sleep. As soon as I’m done harvesting sweet potatoes, I’ll bring in a pruning crew for the peaches. All the prunings are then stacked into the middle, shredded, then disked to incorporate it into the soil. That’ll eventually break down and provide nitrogen.