Hello folks!
As usual, it’s been a busy week here on the farm. We try not to work on the weekends other than going to Farmer’s Markets on Saturday, but sometimes that just doesn’t work out – and this was one of those weekends.
The weather has been pretty warm, to say the least, so keeping the irrigation going on plants has been essential. The weekend required a lot of irrigation, and as other things took the back seat, the weekend also required a lot of weeding. Fortunately, this time most of the weeding was done with a harrow from the seat of a tractor, but if you’ve ever seen our little tractors, you’ll know that this is not the nice air conditioned version. This is the out in the sun, with no shade and hot (or cold in the winter) version.
Now at the end of last week (Friday-ish), the weather folks were predicting highs for the entire week in the upper 90s and even some 100s with lows in the 80s. Unfortunately, we had plants that we had pulled from the greenhouse that needed to be transplanted. With that forecast, we made the decision to put them in the ground over the weekend to try to give the plants a chance at survival with at least one cooler evening and a less hot day. So we took a five-person crew over the weekend and transplanted all of the broccoli that had filled up the greenhouse. In theory, this should have only taken around four hours. In reality, we haven’t completely worked out the kinks on the newer transplanter and it took just a bit longer.
Fortunately, because we’ve changed our outdoor irrigation system a bit, once they were in the ground, we were able to quickly get all of the transplants watered. Also, in a nice turn of weather, we have highs in the 80s for the rest of the week, which will help these little plants out.
This past week we’ve also been working with early starts to try to beat the heat. 6:30 isn’t too bad for a start time, when we consider other days begin at 4:30 and it sure helps everyone survive the heat.
In other farm activities, we’ve been able to harvest with our convey belt this last week which really reduces our labor. It allows us to get the produce into bins and cooler sooner. It also means we walk fewer trips through the field. Check out the pictures on the blog!
Your Farmers,
Ryan, Katie, and Crew