By Anne Basye
La Conner Community News
The Flats are busy this month. Everywhere you look something is being picked, swathed or combined.
Chatting with my local seed grower about the best time for a longer interview, he just laughed. “Thanksgiving!” he said, because his crew is harvesting and planting cabbage, spinach and beets.
So much is ripe and ready — and a touch early, given the warm weather and just enough rain to moisten roots without ruining crops. Dry weather and low moisture are great for wheat. A fleet of green John Deere combines have been harvesting it around La Conner. Dave Hedlin’s winter barley is all harvested. Durum wheat is next in the lineup.
waiting truck.
Hedlin’s cabbage seed has been swathed — cut and laid in rows to help seeds and stalks dry more evenly — and will be harvested by Aug. 15. The 2027 cabbage seed crop goes in soon. A combine will soon head into the fava bean field swathed in mid-July along Chilberg Road. In one pass, it will separate beans from the drying shells and stalks. The beans will be saved for future cover crops; the dried straw will be worked back into the field. Fifty additional acres of organic fava beans will go to organic growers in California.
Washington Bulb Company has pulled up this year’s tulip bulbs along with daffodil bulbs that have spent two years in the ground to promote flower production. Planting next year’s bulbs will begin shortly.
Potatoes are nearly ready, but another few weeks in the field will help set their skins before they are shipped or stored. Experiencing a frost or two is important, too. “Putting a hot potato into 50-degree cold storage will turn them to mush,” said John Thulen of Pioneer Potatoes. “A cold potato is a happy potato!”
Beside irrigating potatoes, he’s been bringing in cabbage seed and prepping to plant 2027 cabbage seed. His beets — not seed, but the kind you eat — are waiting for cooler fall weather to put on size.
Jen Hart and Tim Scott of Hart’s Farm and Homestead pick a variety of vegetables for their weekend markets. They would have planted more lettuce if they had been able to predict what Hart calls “the lettuce pandemic.” Fresh-picked head lettuce has been selling out due to anxiety around cyclospora, the parasite behind recent intestinal infections (traced last week to iceberg lettuce from central Mexico).
Dean Swanson is still picking “record large and great quality” berries. Corn and cucumber will be ready soon. At farmer’s markets, specialty items like yellow beans are selling well to eastern European customers. His take on harvest 2026: “With this summer’s weather, any farmer would count his blessings.”
Hedlin agreed. “Things are looking pretty good.”
And the bottom line?
“This year, crops look better than the balance sheet,” Thulen said. Prices for packaging only go up. Parts for equipment repairs are up 25%. His monthly fuel bill is double what it was a year ago.
“It feels like every email I get is about price increases,” he said. “I’d celebrate anything going down except potato prices.”
Anne Basye is a freelance writer based in greater La Conner.
