This morning was crisp and clear, enough that I ended up having to wait until 9:30 for the frost to thaw so that I could start harvesting. The share today is basically the same as Monday, just the beet variety is different. The Flat of Egypts from Monday were totally thinned so I thinned back through the one remaining Kestrel bed today. While I was waiting for the thaw I started to do a little thinking about next year's bed layouts, and some possible changes. I'm thinking we'll probably take out some of the sod pathway, making more space for vegetables, and reducing our mowing work. I'm a little tempted to completely switch things up with narrower beds, but it's funny how much we're invested in the bed width we have now with the irrigation headers, hoops we just bent, and row cover we're using. I was at a conference last weekend with Eliot Coleman who has always advocated 30" bed tops, which seemed a little narrow to me. At the conference he was talking about how the Parisian market gardeners used a 10" pathway and it suddenly clicked that 30" plus 10" is exactly 1 meter. Not that 30" isn't a good width, I'm coming to appreciate its versatility more and more, but for now we'll stick with a 48" bed top and 18" pathways, perhaps experimenting a bit with a few 24" beds with 9" pathways.
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