Hello Folks,
Happy Independence Day (early)!
I tried not to mention it last week, as I was hoping for some rain, but the name of the game this week has been “Irrigate, Irrigate, Irrigate!” It’s almost hard to remember having how wet it has been this spring when just a few short week[s ago everything so muddy that we couldn’t get transplants in the ground on time. Now, the rain has shut off and we haven’t been able to catch more than 30 hundredths, which is just enough to knock down the dust, but not enough to make anything grow. There will basically be water running at all times on the farm from now on. We have two wells running water in a million different directions in the hope of keeping water on everything.
We had just a few plants still in trays in the greenhouse that got kicked out and put in the ground earlier this week. That included three varieties of nearly 800 pepper plants and five varieties of almost 400 tomatoes. Before we even had those plants in the ground, the greenhouse was getting filled back up with broccoli for the fall. We seeded 90 trays of broccoli and have about another 130 trays to go. I would like to say we have some fancy air seeder that seeds 72 seeds at a time, but some things are better done by hand, so each seed is pulled out of the packet and hand planted one-by-one, just like you might do at home.
We also seeded seven varieties of winter squash in the field. We seed multiple varieties of every crop we plant, partially because its neat to see an acorn squash next to a spaghetti squash next to a kabocha squash. But really, the multiple varieties planted act as a sort of insurance for us. For example, this spring we had those fun white satin carrots that we tried for the first time. They did great for us, but we had to replant all of the orange carrots twice before we had something that would grow.
There are a couple things in this week’s produce that you may be seeing for the first time, be sure to look at the blog for some recipe ideas!
Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, and Crew