As you can see from the photo above, it has been a great basil year at Clagett Farm. We've had so much that we simply could not keep up with it and that's why we urged shareholders to "you pick" as much basil as they could. Well, by now most of the basil has flowered. After flowering basil leaves become more bitter. Yesterday evening, though, two worksharers told me they made good pesto from basil they had harvested earlier in the day. There's plenty left if you want to experiment.
Our fall arugula looks promising. A couple of plantings already matured and a couple of others will be ready later in October. While basil is very frost sensitive, arugula is fairly frost tolerant. So unless a really bad frost hits us (always a possibility) we will probably be harvesting arugula until the end of the season (mid-November.)
Below is a picture of a small thirty-day-old arugula bed. It was direct seeded on August 23 and was already harvestable a month later. Incidentally, because of the shorter days and cooler weather, arugula direct seeded in late September would take somewhat longer than thirty days to reach the same level of maturity.
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