Amazing bugs!

July 5, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

I get a lot of questions about insect pests at the markets and people are usually surprised at the enthusiasm with which I talk about them. It’s hard to be an organic farmer without developing some level of interest in insects and I find them fascinating even though they can drive me up the wall at the same time! The last two years, we’ve had somewhat low levels of several of the pests we deal with yearly, including Japanese beetles (which munch on the leaves of pretty much anything) and Harlequin bugs (which target kale, collards, and other crops in that family.) At the same time, we saw an explosion...

Hot!

June 29, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s hard to believe each year that, right as the summer harvest is beginning, we’re also starting to seed transplants for the fall! This week, I seeded all of the fall brassicas, from kale and collards to cabbage and cauliflower. Meanwhile, the spring kale and collards are gradually moving towards their end as heat and pest pressure increase. At the same time, the cucumbers and zucchini are hitting full stride and the first eggplant are beginning to size up on the plants. (The picture above is of an eggplant flower, which I find one of the most beautiful!) Our field beans are unusually late as they dealt with multiple dips...

Moving into summer

June 22, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

The up and down weather we’ve experienced all season has made our harvesting less predictable than usual. We plant beds so that when one crop is just ending, a new one is just beginning and generally this works out surprisingly well. This year, however, some things are ahead of schedule and others behind, making the transition from crop to crop less on schedule that we would hope! However, the summer crops seem to be gradually coming into their own despite several fairly chilly stretches since they were planted in mid-May. There are a plethora of green tomatoes on the plants, which are about 4 feet tall at this point. The...

Deja Vu

June 15, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

The end of last week felt like a major flashback to 2018, the first year of our farm and the year that basically broke records for rainfall starting in April and running through the entire summer. Last Thursday, I sat in the hoop house while rain cascaded down outside, flooding the farm and causing a small stream to wash through the middle of several beds. We got two inches of rain in one hour! And because apparently that wasn’t enough, we preceded to have unrelentingly heavy rain through the night and the following day, resulting in a total of 5 1/2 inches of rain falling in less that 24 hours,...

Farm friends

June 8, 2021 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Like everyone in our area, we’ve been enjoying the Brood X cicadas over the last few weeks. It’s hard to be an organic farmer without becoming interested in insects. They play a huge role on both sides on the farm and I find them all fascinating. There are the problem ones, like the onion root flies whose larvae destroyed our onions this year and the ubiquitous cabbage moths whose larvae like to munch through anything in the kale and cabbage family. And then, of course, there are the good ones. Lady bugs are probably the best known and we always see a big population of these on the farm. Like...

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...

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...

Storage vegetables

November 10, 2020 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Although we only have two weeks of deliveries left, a great thing about many fall vegetables is how long they can be stored. Cabbage is a perfect example and even comes with it’s own built-in storage container, ie, the outer leaves. Cabbage can keep for weeks in the refrigerator. I would recommend putting it in a plastic bag. However, the outer leaves also act as a “bag” of sorts. When you go to use the cabbage, simply peel off any outer leaves that are yellowing and you’ll see that these will have helped keep the inner leaves fresh and green. In fact, when harvesting cabbage from the field, we leave...

Two Feet in the Dirt

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