Two Feet in the Dirt

This has been the hottest summers we’ve had since starting the farm and it has also been an overall very dry year. After the first year and a half, where we had record rainfalls, we’ve received very little rain since last fall. Fortunately, most of our plants growing right now are those that we can easily irrigate. We use drip irrigation tubing, which lies directly on top of the soil and delivers a slow drip of water to the ground. This not only provides the plants with the water they need, but also helps keep the leaves dry, which is an important tool in preventing foliar diseases.  One of the...

We’re in the midst of a seemingly endless wave of summer heat and doing our best to work in the cooler hours of the morning and evening whenever possible. With the increased heat comes other changes as well. The level and type of pest pressure starts to shift as we enter real summer weather. Colorado Potato Beetles, which despite their name tend to be more of an issue with us on eggplant rather than potatoes, are coming into their element as one of the most unpleasant-looking bugs of the season! Their small white larvae eat in groups and can decimate an eggplant leave in a surprisingly short period of time....

We’ve been lucky the last couple of years. We’ve had hail storms throughout the county and some that have even seemed to skip directly over us, hitting locations on either side but bypassing us, but yesterday we were finally the epicenter. Around 7pm, as I was reading to our son before bed, a huge storm blew through, knocking down limbs and trees and power lines and dropping large hail for several minutes. We headed out as soon as we could to look at the damage. The main victims seem to have been those plants with broad leaves. The tomatoes and carrots, with their abundance of small leaves, are showing little...

One of the first farmers I worked for always said about garlic “plant on Halloween, harvest on the Fourth of July” and that has proven almost exactly true for us. Garlic is the rare crop that is planted the year prior and is in the ground all winter before being harvested the following summer. While it’s always exciting to finally get the garlic out of the ground, the garlic harvest also invariably falls at one of our busiest times of year. Apart from the increasing load of crops like beans, cucumbers, and zucchini that need to be harvested multiple times a week, we are also still in the process of...