Wow, what a scorcher this week has been! With temperatures up near 100 several days this week and the humidity just about maxed out, we had to limit our working hours to mornings and evenings several days as the midday heat was too dangerous to be out in. Unfortunately, even as the heat kept us indoors, the plants and weeds keep growing, meaning we’ll likely have to work through somewhat of a backlog of tasks next week. The tomatoes have been growing like crazy in the field and we’ve gotten a few of the first ripe outdoor cherry tomatoes this week, which means in a week or two we should...
Changing it up
Several things have made this week feel like a transition from spring into summer. With the return, at last, of more consistently sunny weather, the cherry tomatoes in the hoop house, which have been sitting green on the plants for weeks, have finally started ripening. We got our first bumper harvest of cucumbers and zucchini, with Mike single-handedly harvesting 100 pounds of cucumbers on Tuesday, along with our first harvests of string beans. As summer crops like these begin to move in, the spring crops that dominated the farm and the market table for so long are starting to wane. This week, we mowed down two beds of kale and...
Garlic scapes & summer crops!
It wouldn’t be another week without another crazy rain storm. On Wednesday, we had one of the most intense thunderstorms I’ve ever experienced. Fortunately, the period of heavy rain was relatively short and it was more the wind that was damaging. We had a few rows of peas get blown entirely over, although it wasn’t too hard to right them, and basically everything on the farm looked pretty windblown this morning. On a more exciting note, the summer harvest is getting bigger and bigger. On Thursday, we brought in a huge harvest of cucumber and zucchini and the first tomatoes in the hoop house are coloring up, although we’re still...
New crops, new market!
It’s an exciting week on the farm! To start with, as I sit outside writing this on Tuesday afternoon, the sky is blue and it’s not raining, which at this point is about all we can ask for! Additionally, we’re starting to see a true shift in the harvest from exclusively spring greens to more early summer items and even some true high-summer crops. This week will be the first we have a heavy snap pea harvest. While harvesting snap peas can feel like an endless tasks, the sweet crunch of the peas is a pretty good reward! The cucumber and zucchini plants in the hoop house are really taking...
Pushing on
It looks like we are going to get somewhat of a break from the wet weather this week and are just keeping our fingers crossed that the current mostly-sunny forecast stays that way! Over the weekend, we had two more torrential rains, dropping another several inches of rain on the farm. We’ve more or less been in an ongoing flash flood watch in our county for the last several weeks, as the ground is so completely saturated and the rains so unbelievably heavy that the water just runs right off the surface. Creeks around us have been running over their banks on and off for weeks, roads are regularly flooded,...
Pickled radishes & more rain
The rain keeps on falling and at this point I’m mainly just amazed each week that we have anything to harvest. Apart from the in-the-moment damage from heavy rain and flooding, we’re starting to see the more delayed effects, with the onset of rotting in some crops and of diseases like powdery mildew that thrive in hot, humid conditions like these. At times like this, it’s nice to be able to fall back on simple comforts like eating good food. This past week, I’ve made a few tasty recipes, including a quite authentic-tasting pad thai that also called for these amazing pickled radishes as a garnish. While the pad thai...
Pest Season
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
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
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
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...