Two Feet in the Dirt

This is one of the busiest times on the farm, hence the lack of a blog post last week! We’re heavy into the tomato harvest, which takes up significant amounts of time each week. At the time time, we’re starting to plant the first of the fall crops while also planting the last of the summer crops, so all in all we’ve barely got a minute to call our own!  We grow a variety of tomatoes and you’ll see a varied selection over the course of tomato season. This year, we’re again growing one of our favorite heirlooms- Berkeley Tie Die. This striped slicing tomato is both tasty and beautiful....

It’s been incredibly hot this summer and this week looks like another scorcher. We’re lucky to have the flexibility to work in the morning and evening when it’s less oppressive out for both us and our son, who spends a lot of time on the farm with us during the summer. We try to involve Caleb in the farm as much as he likes and each of the past two years he has had his own small garden inside of the farm where he gets to choose what to grow. This year, along with beans, peas, and potatoes, he is also growing enormous sunflowers whose stalks can grow up to...

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...

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,...