New crops, new market!

June 15, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s an exciting week on the farm! To start with, as I sit outside writing this on Tuesday afternoon, the sky is blue and it’s not raining, which at this point is about all we can ask for! Additionally, we’re starting to see a true shift in the harvest from exclusively spring greens to more early summer items and even some true high-summer crops. This week will be the first we have a heavy snap pea harvest. While harvesting snap peas can feel like an endless tasks, the sweet crunch of the peas is a pretty good reward! The cucumber and zucchini plants in the hoop house are really taking...

Losses

May 18, 2018 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It seems like we’ve skipped right over spring and headed into summer already. With hot, humid weather and severe thunderstorms almost every evening this week, it feels more like July than May. We lucked out earlier in the week, with two successive storms dropping large hail just a few miles away from us, but bypassing us completely. Unfortunately, on Tuesday night, we were on the tail end of an enormous storm system that dumped an inch of rain on the farm in just an hour. On Wednesday evening, we got the same thing again and in between has been days and days of steady rain. As you can imagine, this...

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...

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...

Getting the fence up

December 12, 2017 Weekly Updates

It’s beginning to feel a lot like winter with snow over the weekend and temperatures not topping freezing tomorrow. I’m thinking fondly of those unseasonably lovely days just after Thanksgiving with highs in the 60s! With the end of the year just around the corner, we’re at last starting to see an end in sight for all of the work we planned for the fall. We are on the last stage of the deer fence installation- putting the actual fencing in- and like almost everything else we’ve tackled over the last few months, it is more time-consuming than expected. Watching the how-to videos, it looked like a simple process of...

Two Feet in the Dirt

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