From the Fields - Andrew Walker

By Andrew Walker, Yolo County farmer

We farm about 3 acres in Winters. The summer crops are still going. We have a few tomatoes left, some cucumbers, basil, eggplant, pepper and a bit of melon.

We’re still harvesting okra, but it’s slowing down a lot. We’ll be done for the year within the next couple of weeks. It’s not a huge crop for us, but it’s nice to have because not too many people grow it. Okra makes up around 10% of our sales at its peak during the summer. The heat impacted some crops this summer, but the okra did very well. The plants have grown more than 6 feet tall and produced all summer.

We have good demand for okra, but it’s a lot of labor to harvest. It’s just my brother, Eric, and I doing everything on the farm, so we have to balance that with everything else.

We have heirloom tomatoes, Early Girls and cherry tomatoes. We had good yields early in the summer, but it ended bad. The flower set during July just burnt up because of the heat. There are some plants that grew that did not have fruit on them at all.

We mostly sell at a farmers market. The last few weeks, we’ve been taking to the market about 25% as many tomatoes as we normally would, so it’s been a lot slower for us.

We started harvesting lettuce within the past couple of weeks. We’re getting started with bunching greens. We harvested some kale and collard greens, and we’re getting started with chard. These are more of our winter crops. We should have lettuce from now until June.

We don’t have as much quantity during the winter, but we have more variety. We grow carrots, radishes, turnips, beets, spinach, arugula, bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and leaks. Farmers market customers like the variety. They can buy most of what they need at our stand and not have to go to 20 different stands.