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 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