Update May 12th:
Just returned from our annual seed potato trip. If you have tried to contact us, we were well out of internet service for several periods of time and too preoccupied learning some of the finer details of potato growing (and sampling home grown pumpkin pe, raw milk sour cream, and of course potatoes...)
I worried myself to sleep Thursday night over the recently transplanted onions and leeks, the germinating peas and spinach, and all of the plants in the nursery, but Dick did a splendid job looking after my row covers and keeping the nursery watered and warm. We lost a couple of kale seedlings but everything else appears to be fine.
I have increased the number of deliveries for the season to 15 from the previous 12 indicated on the 2018 Basket details page. The amount of produce will not significantly change, but this will add a little flexibility for customers who are spending time away in the summer and even out some of the larger weekly harvests. Two extra delivery dates will probably wind up in August and September.
I also added a June 13 delivery. As I peek ahead at long-term weather models, there is increasing chance of a warmer than usual mid to late spring. (In spite of the dusting of snow on the ground today). This may have a negative impact on spinach, a crop that prefers cool weather, and one that I am hoping to improve upon this season. So I have moved it's sowing date ahead by one week in hopes of getting the most out of early spring temperatures.
Harvesting the green garlic a week early will probably improve its quality as well.
See "This Week's Harvest" page for the June 13 anticipated delivery.
And now for the May 19th post....
I have always thrived on the intensity of a short period of deeply focused work - in high school it was the fall running season; in my early twenties when our music group was preparing for a recording session or a series of shows. Later on, I used the same planning and coping skills while volunteering and later working on the CKCU funding drive and other project management jobs.
Looking after my sleeping and eating habits have been my strong points, though I tend to fight against the flow more so than other folks who do similar types of jobs. The fact that I am dealing with a living field, under a ceiling of ever changing weather helps keep my perspective. I'm a perfectionist, detail oriented person so I have to step back once in a while and remind myself that no-one scores 100 per cent in this sport.
Having said that, the farm is starting to take shape for the season - it's been a very busy pair of weeks here with several 12 hour days of bed preparation, seeding, transplanting, and setting up the irrigation system. The three day trip up to Coe Hill was a pleasant break despite worrying over the onions and leeks on the cold nights.
Several of yesterdays photos did not turn out, so I will fill out the post over the course of the week, but here are a few previews...
Spinach germination has been a real challenge the past few years. Each time it failed to appear, I considered another potential reason and corrected it for the next time - only to have another failure.
Last fall, I drilled into my notes and set out a chart of every year I sowed spinach and looked for a pattern that might explain the difficulty.
I eventually figured out that there were multiple factors.
I used to use row covers on the beds to keep the soil moist after watering. However, I later learned that leaf crops require lots of sunlight, and the row covers typically reduce sunlight by about 15 per cent. So I ceased using those and relied on the irrigation system to keep the beds moist on warm, windy days. That did not work either; I assume the cold water from the well was probably rotting the seeds.
The last time the spinach germinated well was in a bed not serviced by the irrigation system, so that was another clue.This season, I have watered by hand, sometimes up to four times a day (the breeze dries off the soil surface quite quickly) and the results appear to have paid off. The germination is not as good as I would like, but I think we may have enuogh plants to serve everyone - assuming they continue to grow. We'll know better in mid June how this works out.
Pictured here is the second round of spinach just as it breaks the surface.
The peas have germinated well, as usual.These are about two weeks old. In another week or two, I will be pounding in the stakes to trellis the vines to.
One of my most anticipated crops of the spring...the first few will be taste tested in my lunch farm salad, just to make sure they are good enough to send on to all of you...
Here is a crop that I have not planted for several years - endive. Very closely related to lettuce, used as a salad.I tranplanted these yesterday. PLants are best tranplanted on cloudy days (better yet, with a gentle rain) but I can't always count on the weather, so I water them in and then place older (tattered) row covers over them to provide the shade while they get over transplant shock and adjust to the full strength sun, temperature swings of outdoors, and the soil.
To prevent damaging the young plants, I usually place the irrigation tape in the beds before transplant.
Lettuces and endive are two of the very few crops that like wet leaves (most crops suffer when their leaves are exposed to too much moisture) and so I prefer to water these by hand - I think it helps the texture of the final product as well. However, I won't always have time to water by hand, so they will get some added moisture from the well.
The potatoes have started to go into the ground. As of this writing, I have most of the spring white and fingerling potatoes in the ground. I'll do a supplemental sowing in a month or two to make up for any losses.I expect to be posting a photo of the potatoes emerging in about a week or so.
Look closely, and you can see where I have drawn the sowing lines for a bed of carrots just to the right - these were sown about ten minutes after this picture was taken.
The next three days will be a flurry of activity as peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, kale, chard, radish, beets, turnips, etc are sown...its a little later than I would have hoped owing to the ground being frozen a week later than I anticipated this season. So no time to waste...
Talk to you soon,
Bob
(more to follow for this post...)
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