June already!

May 31, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

As always seems to be the case, we’ve gone from famine to feast with rainfall. After several weeks of no rain at all, in the last week we received nearly two and a half inches of rain over just a few days! The summer crops have also had a rather strange start to life in the field, with their first week in the ground marked by record high temperatures that made watering them multiple times a day necessary. This was promptly followed this past weekend by temperatures plummeting to record lows, bottoming out in the low forties at night. After completing the depressing task of pulling all of our onion...

Moving forward

May 24, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

After two weeks with nothing more than a spitting of rain, we finally had a decently wet day on Monday, which was a relief both to the plants and to my arms, which are getting awfully sore from watering! While we are able to rely on drip irrigation to water many of the plants on the farm, the real trick during dry periods is getting the crops that are seeded directly into the field to germinate when it’s not raining. Some things, like arugula and salad mix, germinate fairly quickly, only requiring a few days of watering. Others, particularly carrots, take a lot longer, so it was unfortunate that I...

A rough week

May 20, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s been a pretty devastating week on the farm with the discovery that our entire onion crop is infested with root maggots. Once these pests are present, there’s nothing you can do about them, so instead of getting our first harvest of spring onions, we’ve spent the week ripping out all of our onions. There is also a big chance that this will affect our garlic and we’re just praying that at the very least we are able to save enough to have seed for next year’s crop, especially as one of our garlic varieties is one that I’ve brought with me from farm to farm for years and is...

Waiting…

May 10, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

We’re back into lows in the 30s, so instead of planting the summer crops this week, we’re transporting them inside most nights to keep them warm and protected until the weather warms up again! We’re keeping our fingers crossed that this is the last true cold snap and that we’ll be able to begin on the summer planting this coming weekend. After several fairly dry weeks, we had plenty of rain over the last week and even had a scare over the weekend with a brief hail storm. Fortunately, the hail was so soft that it caused only minimal damage to the crops, which was a huge relief given the...

Not boring!

May 5, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s been quite a week on the farm with a tornado warning, several heavy rainstorms, and multiple power outages! Because we have a well, when the power goes out, the water goes out. This is not only a problem (for obvious reasons) in the house, but is also a huge struggle on the farm. Water is, unsurprisingly, a fairly essential resource in farming. Even when we get sufficient rain for the outdoor beds, we still have the seedlings in trays and the entire hoop house which rely on water from the well. With highs earlier this week up near 90 and all of the summer seedlings out in the hoop...

Two Feet in the Dirt

Archive for May 31, 2021