Welcome back!

April 6, 2020 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

Welcome to the start of the 2020 farm season. As always, we hope that you and your loved ones are safe and healthy. We’re happy to be able to offer this direct delivery service to help everyone stay home and stay healthy while still having access to great fresh produce! Our online store is officially open. Click here to go to our web page with all the details about placing and receiving an online delivery. There will be a Shop Now link on that page that will connect you to our store! Because we are a seasonal farm, our product variety and quantity always starts out small, but quickly...

Direct-to-door deliveries!

March 28, 2020 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

As we welcome everyone back to a new season on the farm, I first want to send our sincere thoughts out to everyone affected by the COVID-19 crisis. I know that it has had an impact on nearly all of our lives and I hope that you and your loved ones are all as safe as can be hoped. In light of the developing situation with COVID-19, we have decided to temporarily suspend our farmers markets and instead run our business as a direct-to-door vegetable delivery service until we feel that the situation is safe enough for us to return to our markets. We will be offering our delivery service in...

First snow, last market

December 5, 2019 Market newsletters, Weekly Updates

It’s hard to believe that the 2019 season is truly reaching its end. This Saturday will be our last farmers market of the year and we want to thank each and every one of you for making this season more of a success than we could ever have imagined. Our sales at each of our farmers markets far exceeded our expectations and, in addition to our newly-added local CSA, have helped move our farm from a start-up venture to a successfully-operating business. Even as we wrap up our 2019 season, the season ahead is already underway in some senses. Today, I’m finalizing our order for next year’s seeds and there...

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...

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...

Two Feet in the Dirt

Red Hawk Rise Organics

Extending the harvest