Two Feet in the Dirt

While we take a break from growing head lettuce in the hottest months of the year, we aim to grow salad mix all year long. However, this can be a struggle in the middle of summer for the simple reason that it is very hard to get lettuce to germinate in hot weather. I finally discovered the reason why this week and found it fascinating. Lettuce is a descendant of a wild plant originating in the Mediterranean area, where summers are hot and dry, meaning that any wild lettuce that germinated in the summer would most likely die. As an adaptation to avoid this, wild lettuce and its descendants that...

We’ve been feeling incredibly lucky over the past week as numerous severe storms have bypassed us. On Sunday, a storm tracking from west to east dropped large hail about 15 minutes both west and east of us, but we only got heavy rain. For about the last month, I’ve nervously watched as multiple storms with threats of hail, high winds, and even tornadoes have moved through our area. I’ve never seen such consistent severe weather, especially this early in the year. Weather is by far the most stressful part of farming. It’s something we have absolutely no control over and can do nothing to affect. We just have to wait...

As frequently happens in the weeks surrounding our final spring frost date, the weather has been all over the place recently. Two Tuesdays ago, we had lows dipping to about 40 degrees, followed by a Sunday and Monday with temperatures up near 90! Because of the cold snap, I held off on putting most of our summer transplants into the ground until the end of last week, but now the fields are full of peppers, eggplant, tomato, cucumber, and zucchini plants and the first beans are pushing up through the ground. With temperatures up to summer-like levels, we decided it was time to put the shade cloth onto the hoop...

As spring moves towards summer, more and more crops are becoming ready to harvest, so the selection at the market continues to grow nearly weekly. I’ve had a lot of questions about what new things will be available in the coming weeks, so wanted to do a quick update about what crops to expect soon! In the next few weeks, look forward to the first kohlrabi and spring onions. Spring onions look like huge scallions, but are really the uncured form of the onions most of us are used to eating. We harvest them before they are at the life stage when they can be cured for storage, so, like...