Green garlic and more hot weather

April 25, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

The hot weather continued this week, with temperatures over 80 degrees on Tuesday, meaning the hoop house was up in the 90s! Warm springs sound like a good thing, with plants grower faster and getting ready for harvest sooner. The peas are about twice as tall as they were at this time last year! But in fact I find this type of weather at this time of year pretty trying. Spring is already the busiest time on the farm for us. The majority of what we grow is planted sometime between mid-March and mid-May, meaning that we are putting in an unprecedented number of seeds and seedlings along with trying...

Warm spring

April 18, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s been another busy week on the farm. Our new challenge this spring has been dealing with the rye cover crop that we planted in many beds to protect them over the winter. It’s our first year getting in a decent cover crop, which is an important part of maintaining soil health on an organic farm. However, rye can grow quickly and become a challenge to manage as temperatures increase in the spring so it’s important to get it mowed down and tilled under in time. After much reading and talking to fellow farmers, we are employing a system of mowing down the rye about 3 weeks in advance of...

First market 2019!

April 11, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Welcome to the 2019 season! We’re excited for the first Burke farmers market this coming Saturday, April 13! It’s been a strange spring on the farm. We started off with some incredibly cold weather when we were first planting in our hoop house which slowed germination and initial growth of most of the early plantings. And now we’re at the other extreme, with very warm, sunny, and sometimes even humid days that feel more like early summer than early spring. Fortunately, with our first season now behind us, our operations on the farm are a little more streamlined. Last year at this time, we were still in the process of...

Last market

December 6, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s hard to believe that this Saturday will be our last farmers market of the 2018 season. It honestly doesn’t feel like that long ago that we were preparing for our first market (pictured above). Reaching the end of our market season is both a sad and happy benchmark for us. We will miss seeing all of our wonderful customers at the market for the next several months, but are also looking forward to a much needed break (and to a few months of getting to sleep in past four in the morning on Saturdays!) The farm is certainly starting to look like the season is at an end, with...

Nearing the end

November 29, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

After a long season of hard work, it’s difficult to believe that we only have two farmers markets left this year! With a heavy freeze last week on Thanksgiving night and temperatures dipping into the mid-teens, almost all of our harvest at this point is from inside of our hoop house, but there is still plenty growing in there! (See below for our full harvest list.) With most of the outdoor beds now done for the season, we’re moving on to mowing those down and putting in the last bit of cover crop. While we might not get much early winter growth off of the cover crop at this point...

Happy Thanksgiving & a tasty recipe!

November 22, 2018 In the Kitchen, Market newsletters, Other recipes, Weekly Updates

Happy Thanksgiving! We hope you all have a wonderful holiday and that, if you’re in our area, you manage to keep warm! We’ve spent much of the early part of this week preparing in various ways for the extreme cold front we have coming through. Temperatures are predicted to drop into the low 20s Wednesday night, not rise above freezing on Thursday, and then drop to a shocking 18 degrees on Thursday night! I’m double- and triple-covering beds in the hoop house and we’ve also taken various measures to try to keep the outside walk-in refrigerator where we store all of our crops post-harvest from dipping below freezing and causing...

Winter storm

November 15, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Weather in November is always a bit of an unknown, but with a significant ice storm in our forecast for Thursday, this week is definitely taking the weather ups and downs to the extreme. In advance of the storm, we’re harvesting off much of the last of our crops that are growing outside of the hoop house, including the bunching kale and collards. Living in a rural area, we are reliant on electricity not only for inside our house, but also for our water which is pumped from our well with an electric pump, so we’ve spent the day preparing for a possible power outage by making sure we will...

Full circle

November 8, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

As we move into the fall, it’s really starting to feel like we’ve completed a full year on the farm. For most of the last year, everything we’ve done has been done for the first time on this farm, but over the last few weeks, we’ve started cycling back through tasks we completed at this time last year. Just like last year, we’ve been seeding cover crop to protect beds and preserve soil over the winter. We’ve also covered a large section of beds with a thick silage tarp which will not only protect the beds over winter, but also allow us to get into these beds for the earliest...

Garlic time!

November 1, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Halloween week is always an extra exciting one on the farm as it marks the planting of the next year’s garlic! This Tuesday, we put in about 1,350 cloves of garlic, all planted from the biggest heads that we saved from each of our three varieties when we harvested them this past July. The smaller cloves were planted in a separate section and will be harvested next year as green garlic to further supplement our early spring offerings. The biggest and best of the cloves were planted to provide next year’s full-sized heads of garlic, as well as the seed garlic for 2020. Along with the two varieties of garlic...

Frosty weather

October 25, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s official- last Friday morning we got our first frost of the fall, followed by another on Monday morning. While first frosts are frequently fairly light, both so far this year have been quite heavy frosts, not clearing until well into the morning. While this marks the end of the “summer” season, plenty of crops still grow through and even benefit from early fall frosts. Brassicas in particular have a unique way of protecting themselves from freezing. As the temperatures drop, these plants increase the sugar content in the water inside the plant, which acts like antifreeze to lower the temperature at which the water inside the plants freeze. This...