Another update as of this afternoon...they're here...


The black ones are Dominiques, the light ones are Buckeyes.

The red tint is from the heat lamp















A quick update:

The garlic is growing well.  The earliest plants to emerge have some tip burn, possibly from water stress or perhaps a little sunburn from when the straw was removed from the first shoots.














Welcome to the team!

Minnie is helping out this season.  She is hoping to take on the farm as Whitsend transitions out.

Surface cultivating is a technique that suppresses weeds quite effectively.  More efficient than weeding full grown plants.















Pictured faintly are the spinach plants germinating.  It appears that the germination rate has been fairly successful.



















We transplanted about one third of the tomatoes today.  For this bed, we have undersown the first succession of celtuce.

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The seedlings are still quite young, so a little added protection is provided by the row covers for the first week or so.  It helps break the wind, reduces the fll strength of the sunlight, and hods in the heat for the cool nights.

The peas initially germinated quite unevenly, possibly due to the cool weather.

The rows have filled out over the past week, though there are a couple of small gaps.

 With progress comes setbacks.  This is how a two hour task becomes a four hour chore and a two day delay on work that needs finishing last week...

Halfway through some light tilling, the tire goes flat.  A quick examination reveals a little more happening than a leak.  Cover the engine with a tarp and head for you tube.

Hello Everyone:

Finally the weather is improving enough to start more sowing and planting.  Everything is late and the time pressure is building. 

The best news is that the garlic is growing well, though I may have to harvest early.

So far this year, the weather seems to be following a pattern similar to 2017.  That year, the amount of rain damaged a lot of the garlic and caused a considerable amount of it to go bad before harvest.  When I compared notes with other growers, most said that in such seasons the bulbs should be harvested about two weeks sooner.  The bulbs are smaller with such an early harvest but at least they are still sound.

This photo and the following one taken by Minnie.

It is said that one failure teaches more than a hundred successes.  With this in mind, I should be able to produce a great crop of spinach this year.  Keep the row cover off the bed to allow for maximum sunlight as spinach needs a lot of light to germinate.  Keep the beds moist but not soaked to prevent the seeds from rotting.  Thin the seedlings sooner rather than later.  Don’t sow too early (not enough leaf production) or too late (before the weather turns too hot for good quality leaf).  I’ve made all these mistakes over the years and assuming I hit a good planting date, we should finally have some decent spinach.

The past two weeks I have been cultivating the beds as much as possible to suppress this year’s crop of weeds before they get started.  The beds are ready for the early crops to go into this week.  Chard, kale, kohlrabi and hopefully some lettuce should be making its way out of the nursery.  Carrot and radish seeds are likely going in soon.

On Monday we are taking our annual trip up to Coe Hill to pick up the seed potatoes from Ellenberger Farm.  Our usual two day “holiday” will have to be a day trip this year.  Each season I go there, I learn more about potato growing in twenty minutes of discussion with Henry and Janet than I do for the rest of the season.  One of the benefits of moving to Lanark is that the drive to Coe Hill is about an hour shorter.

A ten minute conversation with Henry on the phone the other day has already expanded my knowledge of seed potatoes.  These ones were saved last year and stored in the dark over the winter. 

When I pulled them out last week, I found that they all had very long eye stalks already growing; so long as to make sowing very difficult.  Previously, I had thought that breaking off the stalks would render the plant incapable of producing plants, but Henry's wealth of experience put my fears to rest.  

At his direction, I have removed the long stalks and placed the tubers in a bit of sunlight to encourage a new set of stalks to start.  This should take a week or two, and then the potatoes are ready to plant.  The process of removing the eyes of potatoes is called “chitting”.

The melted snow here in Lanark has revealed a greater mess than I anticipated.

These were beds that I was hoping to prepare for production next year.  It's possible that they can be cleaned up by fall, though timing will be everything.  The amount of quack grass rules out even the lightest use of a tiller here; I'll have to bring my curve tine wheel cultivator home and find time to cultivate to make this area productive.

 

Julia cleaned up an area that was plastic mulched over the winter (at the top of the photo) and sowed flowers for the forthcoming bee hives.

There are some pleasant surprises too.  This is one of many flower beds of bulbs and herbs that has a lot of potential to expand once they are cleaned up, aerated, and the soil amended with  compost.

The rhubarb is coming up but as you can see from the photo its bed is quite choked with at least a season’s worth of grass.  I doubt the stalks of all these otherwise healthy plants will produce the quantity this many plants would otherwise be capable of.  I’ll harvest it over the course of the next month or so but it will take a lot of time cutting and cleaning this many small stalks.  Those of you who receive some will have less chopping to do...

I’ll be contacting everyone soon about final payment and getting our email list together.  There are still a couple of shares left to sell, so if you know of anyone who is interested, please let them know as soon as possible.

Talk to you soon,

Bob

Hello Everyone:

Time goes by too quickly.  There is so much to write about I don’t know where to start.

 

The nursery seems to have stabilised.  I lost most celeriac, onions and leeks in the early spring to damping off, probably from running the nursery a little too cool.  The first celery, parsley, and lettuces did not do well either but their replacements are on the way and starting to harden off. 

The other crops – tomatoes, peppers, chard, kale, and kohlrabi are growing well. 

Out in the field of the Stittsville farm, the garlic is back to my usual emergence rate of 98 to 99 per cent.  The snow peas were a sown a week later than I wanted to due to the field being too wet.  The sorrel is very patchy and does not seem to have self seeded very well. 

I’m very glad that I took the time to aerate the new portion of field last fall as I assume that has allowed the water percolate deep into the soil and allow the beds to dry uniformly.  This time last year, this same location had standing water on the surface.

The main portion of the growing field is cultivated and soon ready for the seeds and transplants. 

The Lanark farm is where most of my efforts are focussed right now.

The melting snow revealed a great mess of winter debris – a season’s worth of work has thawed out.  The herbs look like they have plenty of potential, but it seems that some fall preparation was missed; none of the plants were mulched. 

The brush along the electric fence needed a lot of trimming back, the tool shed a complete re-organising, and livestock hutches a though cleaning out.

Old equipment from the previous farm here, inventoried back in the winter, is now being set out and examined closely.  There is hundreds of feet of hose – some useful, some requiring repair, and some not meeting our needs.  All the buckets and containers are getting a sterilising.  Fencing for the livestock is going up and plots of ground are being surveyed.

June is going to be busier, with the arrival of chicks, pigs, mushrooms and seed potatoes. 

I haven’t seen much activity in the asparagus bed, but the rhubarb is growing very well.  The number of plants that have come up are much more than I recall being told about.  There will be no shortage of this crop.

There will be more news and photos to follow...

Bob