Two Feet in the Dirt

One of the best parts of farming is having the opportunity to grow and try new things. I had never had escarole until about 10 years ago when I tried it at an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia sautéed, as is traditional, with a ton of garlic. I instantly fell in love and decided that I would grow escarole myself. Since then, my love of this leafy green veggie has only grown. Escarole looks nearly indistinguishable from lettuce, but is most commonly eaten cooked. The best thing about cooked escarole is the way it sucks up the flavors of whatever it is cooked with. It makes an excellent warm and flavorful...

As is usual with autumn in our region, we’ve bounced right back to late summer weather, with hotter, humid weather over the past few days. My body seems to have already moved on to fall and has not been to happy being outside in the heat and humidity. I’m definitely looking forward to the return of cooler weather, although, when the forecast is for highs in the 80s with a chance of thunderstorms, it’s hard to believe that our average first frost date is in just a couple weeks!  If nothing else, the warmer weather will help to give some of the late fall crops a bit of a boost...

With mid-September upon us, we’re moving into more and more cool season veggies, even as the weather this week seems to want to jump back to more summer-like temperatures and humidity! On the farm, we’ve tilled under the majority of this year’s cucumber and zucchini and replanted the beds in an oat/pea cover crop. While some of the cover crops we use can grow through the winter, oats and peas are sensitive to cold temperatures and will eventually die and form a protective mulch on the bed through the winter months. Therefore, it is ideal to get this cover crop seeded on the early side so that the plants can...

Another week, another tropical storm! Today, we’re largely inside as rains from Ida continue to drench the region. We’re lucky that the track of the storm shifted enough that, instead of the original prediction of 6+ inches of rain, it looks like we’ll be getting a slightly more reasonable amount. It looks like the storm will be shepherding in a much more pleasant spate of weather with significantly lower temperatures and humidity, something we are more than ready for. We’re heavy into fall planting at this point, with the first radishes and lettuce set to be harvestable in the coming weeks, so it’s a relief to see that the weather...

We were expecting to be inundated with rain today from Tropical Storm “Fred”, but instead barely saw a drop and had an incredibly humid, sunny day instead. There’s a reason people used to talk about the weather all the time. Back when so many people were farmers or grew food for themselves, weather was all controlling. We plan our work week entirely upon the weather. Yesterday, we worked like crazy and put in an incredibly long day to try to get what we needed done before the heavy rain. I also always try to plan any planting to fall just before with rainy days so that the new seeds and...

It looks like scorching temperatures are in store for us this week. With highs at the end of the week topping out near 100 degrees, it will be the hottest weather we’ve seen this summer. This is definitely a challenge as we are at the height of our fall transplanting and it’s a tough choice to decide whether it’s better to hold off on planting seedlings to spare them the heat or risk the heat in order to get them out of the seedling trays that they are beginning to outgrow. Besides just the heat, we’re also struggling with extremely low rainfall. Until a series of thunderstorms yesterday, we hadn’t...