Happy Thanksgiving!

November 28, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Happy Thanksgiving! We hope that all of you are enjoying a wonderful holiday today. I’m going to keep this week’s post short as we try to enjoy a somewhat work-free day ourselves, but wanted to confirm that, even with the holiday weekend, we will still be at Burke this Saturday as usual! See our full harvest list below. Last market, the large-leaf bunched spinach was a surprise hit, so we’ll be bringing even more of it this week! Enjoy the long weekend and we hope to see you on Saturday! Farmers Katie & Mike This week at the market: Purple-topped turnips Lettuce salad mix Bok Choi Arugula Radishes Spinach...

Thanksgiving recipes

November 21, 2019 In the Kitchen, Market newsletters, Other recipes, Weekly Updates

It’s the market before Thanksgiving and we hope you’ll take the opportunity to pick up some organic veggies for your Thanksgiving dinner! With potatoes, cabbage, and turnips still aplenty, we’ve been searching through recipes to find some good options to incorporate these ingredients into our Thanksgiving dinner and wanted to share some of our finds with you! Mike is a serious cabbage lover and, as a result, we decided to increase our cabbage production this year. We eat cabbage in tons of different ways, from traditional cole slaws, to topping for tacos, to stir-fries. We’re always looking for new methods of incorporating it into meals, so are really looking forward...

Feels like winter!

November 14, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

We’re experiencing some exceptionally cold weather this week, with the highs on several days never topping the 30s and lows dipping into the low 20s and high teens. It feels more like January than early November! With winter seemingly upon us, this was the perfect week to finally pull out all of the tomato plants, which had been blasted by frost over the last few weeks. Mike has been hoping to have an opportunity to burn end of season plant debris for the last couple years and, with the tomatoes, he finally had his chance! Last year, we removed the tomatoes far before the frost date. With the continual heavy...

Extending the harvest

November 6, 2019 Uncategorized

With overnight freezing temperatures and morning frosts becoming more and more the norm, the farm is really starting to move into winter mode. Only the hardiest crops remain in the field, among them several of the baby greens, kale and collards, turnips, and the extremely cold-hardy spinach. But even these we have covered in floating row cover, a product that acts like a mini-greenhouse, maintaining a slightly higher temperatures underneath than what is reached outside. And more and more of our harvest is coming out of our hoop house. Also known as high tunnels, hoop houses have become very common on small-scale farms like our’s in the last few decades...

Garlic time!

October 31, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Garlic is a unique crop in that the heads that you buy were actually planted in the ground the previous season. Every year, we put the next year’s garlic in right around Halloween and for me this always feels like both a beginning and an ending. The garlic needs to be planted late enough that it doesn’t begin growing above ground before winter sets in but early enough that it is in before the ground is too frozen when the soil is still workable. As a result, garlic is always the last crop we put in each year, marking the end of the huge task of planting that takes up...

First frost

October 24, 2019 In the Kitchen, Market newsletters, Other recipes, Weekly Updates

We did indeed get our first frost last Saturday morning and, funny enough, it happened on the exact same day as last year’s first frost! Of course, in line with mid-Atlantic autumns, the weather has subsequently bounced right back up into cool, but not freezing, conditions. However, with the frost comes the end of the some of the summer crops we’ve been harvesting for the last several months. We may have a handful of red tomatoes, but for the most part we’ll be bringing green tomatoes to market this week. I always get excited for green tomatoes, both because they act as a signifier for the winding down of the...

Cabbage & cover crops

October 17, 2019 In the Kitchen, Market newsletters, Other recipes, Weekly Updates

The cooler weather seems to be sticking with us at last and, with some more decent rain this week, it’s starting to actually feel seasonally normal! With the first frost looming on the horizon, we’re starting to move out of the types of work that make up most of the season and into preparations for winter. We’ve finished planting crops in the fields and all but one of the beds in the hoop house are sprouting seedlings of various types. As we reach the end of these plantings, we are instead moving into a new type- the seeding of cover crops that will help protect the soil structure over winter...

Cooling down

October 10, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

The weather at last seems to have taken a turn in many senses. Not only is it significantly cooler than the 80- and 90-degree temperatures we saw last week, but additionally we’ve had two solid periods of rain, which is something we haven’t seen much of for the past month. Unfortunately, the cooler, wetter weather has introduced some new late-season disease problems that are causing us head aches with some of the baby greens. With our typical frost date usually falling sometime in the next few weeks, we’re hoping to see some truly cold weather that will help end the disease pressure for the season. I find diseases to be...

Bad weather, good news

October 3, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Everyone reading this blog has been getting a real taste of the main thing farmers think and talk about over the past few weeks- the weather. Recently, NOAA released a drought statement for our area. With DC and areas of Northern Virginia having been classified as “Moderate Drought” with soil moisture levels as low as 0-5%, we’re feeling lucky thus far to have only hit the “Abnormally Dry” stage with 10-20% soil moisture. With a decent rainfall of half an inch on Monday and more rain predicted for the coming week, we’re keeping our fingers crossed that conditions for everyone change soon. On a much better note, we were so...

Waiting on weather

September 26, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Driving home Saturday evening after a long day at the market, I noticed some clouds that looked suspiciously like thunderheads. By the time we got home, we were seeing flashes of lightning and soon enough, completely out of line with the forecast, it started to rain! We ended up getting about a quarter of an inch, which isn’t too shabby given the extreme dryness recently. The ideal for keeping the crops happy is to get about an inch of rain per week, with more needed during hotter weather. At this point, even getting a quarter of an inch takes some of the pressure off of us and provided us with...