Feels like summer!

April 28, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

We’re back to scorching weather this week, with temperatures yesterday and today reaching up into the 80s. And, fittingly, we’re moving more and more in the direction of summer crops. We just finished laying the plastic mulch that we plant our peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, and okra in each year. This is one of the worst jobs of the year, requiring manual burying of hundreds of feet of sheeting, and it’s always a relief when we finish. We’ve also just transplanted the pepper seedings into our hoop house, which will stay in there until near the first frost in the fall! The first round of beans was seeded into the hoop...

Wild weather

April 19, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

After a couple weeks of overly warm weather, we’ve had some spring-like cool, cloudy days recently and now have some very cold nights in store. But the warm weather definitely had an impact. We’ve moved to harvesting from outside beds (as opposed to those in the hoop house) about a week earlier than usual. We also switched out our cold-weather row cover on the kale, arugula, radishes, and other brassica crops to warm-weather bug netting, which we normally don’t use until summer, although we’ve subsequently had to recover everything in row cover for tonight’s cold, windy forecast! The spring crop pests are also making an entrance earlier than expected, with...

Important Changes to Market Sales!

April 14, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Thank you all for a wonderful welcome back to the farming season last week! After our first week back at the Burke market, we have decided that we are ready to return to standard at-market sales of vegetables as opposed to utilizing the online store. At the market last week, we were able to get a better sense of the lay of the land and how to set up and operate in the era of coronavirus. Additionally, the CDC’s recent release of updated information regarding the extremely low risk of transmission via touching items has convinced us that returning to a standard market sales model is now a safe option...

Season start!

April 6, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s been quite a lead-up to the 2021 market season with the weather fluctuating over the past few weeks from highs in the 70s to lows in the 20s. March seemed to come in like a lion and go out like a lion, with high winds fairly consistent throughout the month and into early April. The combination of unstable temperatures with the dehydrating effect of wind can be very challenging on young plants. Last week’s cold snap, coupled with high winds, wiped out the entire first planting of beets, which had just emerged above the soil, and resulted in the need to replace several rows of recently-planted seedlings. At times...

Welcome to the 2021 Season!

April 1, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Welcome back for the 2021 Season! We’re excited for the start of another farming year and looking forward to seeing you all at market! This year, we will be attending the Burke Farmers Market in person beginning Saturday, April 10 and will be joining the Shepherdstown Farmers Market in May. For the time being, sales at Burke will be exclusively via pre-orders through our online store. Please visit our Buy Online page to learn more. Please note that we start off each year with a limited quantity and variety of vegetables as we come out of the cold of winter and are initially harvesting only from our hoop house. As...

Two Feet in the Dirt

Archive for April 28, 2021