Oh, the weather

April 20, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

What a weather roller coaster this spring has been! Over the past month, we’ve had a foot of snow, 55 mph winds, temperatures of 19 and 89 degrees in the same week, and, most recently, two inches of rain in just 12 hours. Weather is always one of the most challenging variables in farming and it makes it even more so when the weather is so extreme and unpredictable. The great thing about plants is that they are for the most part pretty adaptable and just keep on growing! For us, the biggest recent change is getting back into the swing of market season. After months of seemingly endless work,...

First market newsletter!

April 13, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Wow, it’s hard to believe after over a year of working to find and set up our farm that our first farmers market is finally here! It’s been a crazy winter, with both extreme cold and unusually warm weather and this fluctuation has continued into April. In fact, there is snow falling right now! Over the weekend, temperatures plummeted to 19 degrees overnight, vastly colder than it had gotten in weeks. We had seen the cold temperatures forecast, so got out on Saturday to make sure all of the outside beds were fully covered in thick row cover. Inside the hoop house, even with the plants covered not just by...

April 2018 Photo Shoot

April 8, 2018 Monthly Photo Shoots, Weekly Updates

March into April is always a transformative time on a farm in this area. As you’ll see in these photos, we went from a bare hoop house to an explosion of green and even had time to squeeze in a significant snow storm! Be on the lookout later this week for our first market newsletter in advance of our first day at the Burke farmers market this Saturday, April 14 from 8am-12pm!...

Certified!

March 29, 2018 Weekly Updates

It’s been an exciting week for us, even while we’re still waiting for all of the snow to melt! Over the weekend, we made our first sale- several pounds of arugula to the Community Garden Market, a natural foods store in nearby Shepherdstown. And at the end of this week, we’ll be selling lettuce mix to the same store. I also harvested several pounds of baby kale from the hoop house, but elected to keep that for our own use, as well as giving away a few bags to neighbors. It’s been great to have fresh, home-grown greens on hand again! In addition, we are now officially Certified Organic and have...

Onion Snow

March 20, 2018 Weekly Updates

What a difference a day makes! Yesterday we were outside in T-shirts prepping beds in sunny, 60-degree weather. Today, it’s barely getting above freezing and there’s already several inches of snow on the ground, with many more predicted to fall over the next 24 hours. And, I swear, this is what happens every year I’ve been running a farm. You get right up to mid-March when outdoor planting can begin in earnest and, invariably, a snow storm decides to pop into the picture. At this point, I more or less plan on it! We did take a few steps to prepare for the snow. Yesterday, we prepped a bunch of...

Planning your garden

March 12, 2018 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

This is the first farm that I have set up from scratch, so we’ve had to make decisions about things that on previous farms had already been established. If you are getting ready to set up your own garden in anticipation of the coming growing season, here are two bits of advice from what I’ve learned: First, think carefully about how wide you want your beds to be. I have almost always worked on farms where the beds are 4 feet wide. However, in doing some reading in advance of setting up our farm, I was convinced to try 2.5-foot-wide beds instead and, let me tell you, what an amazing...

Seeing Spring

March 4, 2018 Weekly Updates

It’s been lovely watching spring begin to cautiously peak its head around the corner. With the recent warmer temperatures, our garlic has popped above its layer of straw mulch and the hay field next door has turned from a determined winter brown to a startling green. As more and more hints appear that winter’s end is not too far off, our preparatory work is drawing to an end and the real growing season is more and more upon us. We do, of course, still have a few tasks to complete that fit more into the “farm set up” category. One of the big projects that had been looming over us...

Heat wave!

February 24, 2018 Weekly Updates

We got a little flash of summer this week with two record-breaking days of temperatures around 80 degrees. As a result, our focus quickly shifted from keeping the hoop house warm to keeping it cool, a problem I wasn’t anticipating in February! Even with the sides rolled up all of the way and the door and window open, temperatures were still getting up near 90, not ideal for the cool-weather spring crops planted inside. Whereas it took the first round of hoop house beds at least a week to germinate, the beds planted right before this mini heat wave were up in a matter of days! As a result, inside...

Ice & Seeds

February 8, 2018 Weekly Updates

You really start to see the advantages of a hoop house when you have an ice storm one day and are putting seeds in the ground the next. While the trees and ground were still covered in a good amount of ice this morning, inside the hoop house I watched the thermometer gradually rise to 74 degrees while I prepped beds! (And that’s compared to only 29 degrees outside at the same time.) By this afternoon, we’ll have five beds planted with spring mix, arugula, baby kale, spinach, and radishes. To offer additional protection, each bed with also be covered with a layer of heavy duty row cover which will...

Flashes of green

January 23, 2018 Weekly Updates

The frigid temperatures that settled in over the past month have finally broken and after that steady stream of lows in the teens and single digits, anything above freezing feels like the Caribbean! So it’s been T-shirt weather the last few days with highs jumping up into the 60s. With our work so dependent on the weather, we know to take advantage of good weather when we have it, so we’ve spent the last few days working hard on getting the hoop house fully completed. Mike installed the cranks for the roll-up sides yesterday. These will allow us to roll up about 4.5 feet of the plastic covering to vent...