Archive for May 30, 2019

Archive

Ups and downs

There’s a good and bad side to everything and the early heat this year is no different. This week, we’ve gotten to see both the ups and downs of this weather. On the positive side, we’re getting many of our crops in earlier than last year. This week, one of my yearly favorites, garlic scapes, will make its debut. Garlic scapes used to be seen as only a leftover bi-product of garlic production and were usually relegated to the farm’s own kitchen, but they’ve gained in popularity in recent years and for good reason. They combine the traditional taste of garlic with a hint of sweetness and are especially tasty...

Hot & cold

As frequently happens in the weeks surrounding our final spring frost date, the weather has been all over the place recently. Two Tuesdays ago, we had lows dipping to about 40 degrees, followed by a Sunday and Monday with temperatures up near 90! Because of the cold snap, I held off on putting most of our summer transplants into the ground until the end of last week, but now the fields are full of peppers, eggplant, tomato, cucumber, and zucchini plants and the first beans are pushing up through the ground. With temperatures up to summer-like levels, we decided it was time to put the shade cloth onto the hoop...

Weed Management

Although pest and disease management are the issues that most readily come to mind when thinking of organic farming, keeping the weeds in check is actually a more consistent challenge. Starting in early spring and continuing into the fall, we spend time every week making sure that the crops stay ahead of the weeds. In order to do this both effectively and efficiently, we rely upon a variety of techniques and tools. While we certainly do more than our share of pulling weeds by hand, we aim to minimize our time spent doing this by taking preemptive measures to help the crops outcompete the weeds from the get-go. Cover cropping...

Coming soon

As spring moves towards summer, more and more crops are becoming ready to harvest, so the selection at the market continues to grow nearly weekly. I’ve had a lot of questions about what new things will be available in the coming weeks, so wanted to do a quick update about what crops to expect soon! In the next few weeks, look forward to the first kohlrabi and spring onions. Spring onions look like huge scallions, but are really the uncured form of the onions most of us are used to eating. We harvest them before they are at the life stage when they can be cured for storage, so, like...

New things coming

As we enter our second growing season, we’re starting to look ahead and to work towards some of our more long-term goals. The most exciting of these by far is the addition of fruit to our crop plan. This past month, after much research and hard work, Mike planted our first bed of strawberries along with twelve blueberry plants! As most fruit plants takes one or more years to become productive after planting, neither of these will be at market this year. We should have our first strawberries next spring and the blueberries the year after that. This week, I spent some time picking all of the flower buds off...

Follow

Get the latest posts delivered to your mailbox: