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...

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...

Giving thanks

November 16, 2020 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s hard to believe we’re already to the end of the 2020 season and nearly to Thanksgiving! This week, I wanted to use the blog post for two purposes, the first being to thank all of you sincerely for your incredible support this year. This year has been a challenging one for everyone everywhere and has certainly been a hard one for small businesses. We made the decision to stick with direct deliveries for the entire 2020 season as we believed this was the best way to keep both ourselves and all of you as safe as possible. But, of course, we could not have done this without the weekly...

Two Feet in the Dirt

Looking forward

Extending the harvest

Spring has sprung

Heat wave!

Working around cucumber beetles

Shelling beans