Pest Season

May 25, 2018 Market newsletters, Pests, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

This week definitely entails a lot of re-grouping for us. We had beds to rebuild and tons of peppers, eggplant, and tomatoes to finally get in the ground. Mike spent hours on Monday reburying all of the plastic mulch on the tomato beds. The dirt that was holding it down had been washed away in last week’s torrential rain and it was no fun at all to have to re-do an already challenging task that we thought we had completed for the year. Even as we feel like we’re still playing catch-up, the natural world continues to roll along and pest season on the farm has officially begun. Flea beetles...

Losses

May 18, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It seems like we’ve skipped right over spring and headed into summer already. With hot, humid weather and severe thunderstorms almost every evening this week, it feels more like July than May. We lucked out earlier in the week, with two successive storms dropping large hail just a few miles away from us, but bypassing us completely. Unfortunately, on Tuesday night, we were on the tail end of an enormous storm system that dumped an inch of rain on the farm in just an hour. On Wednesday evening, we got the same thing again and in between has been days and days of steady rain. As you can imagine, this...

Summertime’s a-coming

May 11, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

After last week’s heat wave, it’s really starting to feel like summer is coming on the farm. The tiny gnats that drove us crazy last summer are officially back. While the crops in the field seem to have shot up inches in days, the weeds are growing like crazy, too, meaning we’re at the start of what is always one of the biggest tasks throughout summer- weeding. We were lucky enough to buy a used flame weeder from our neighbors who run a small farm down the road and Mike has been figuring out how to use it to make our lives at least a little less weedy! Most exciting,...

Warming up

May 4, 2018 Market newsletters, Uncategorized, Weekly Updates

It’s been another wild week of weather, with a hard frost on Monday morning and temperatures up near 90 by the end of the week! In just a few days, we went from blanketing the summer crops in the hoop house under multiple layers of row cover to keep them warm to watering all of the greens like crazy trying to keep them cool. What made things even more unpredictable is that, at the start of all of the heat, our well went dry! Well, not dry in the sense I automatically thought of, as in- there is no more water. Instead, a mechanical failing in our pump meant that...

Two Feet in the Dirt

Archive for May 25, 2018