It’s hard to believe that Mother’s Day is almost here. What do you get for the mom who has everything? We think you should give her a CSA memebership with Pekarek’s Produce. Every week of the summer, she could receive a produce bag that looks like this:
It’s easy to sign up for and a gift that will make her think of you all summer long! Learn more about the CSA by reading the flyer below or clicking here. Give us a call if you have any questions!
Although we’ve been hard at work for quite some time and eating delicious veggies, tomorrow marks the true start of the vegetable season – or at least that’s the way it feels. The very first farmer’s market of the season for us starts tomorrow at the Lincoln Haymarket Farmer’s Market. It marks the beginning of 20 weeks of 4:30 am wake up calls, loading trucks in the dark/rain/thunderstorms/heat/cold, and exhausting Saturdays. But it also marks the start of a lot of fun! We love seeing everyone at the farmer’s markets and really enjoy that we can bring people joy simply by growing what we love.
One of my favorite questions we get this time of year is…. Do you have watermelon? (or insert another summer/fall vegetable of your choice here). Grocery stores have trained us to think all fruits and vegetables should be available at all times. But if you’ve ever tried to grow a garden, you know you can’t get Nebraska watermelon in May! So in that spirit, we took another stab at the Crops Calendar. Take a look below to figure out when your favorite produce will be ready. This is what we have on our farm, so it can vary from farmer to farmer. Our calendar has changed drastically as we have put up three high tunnels this year and a greenhouse last year. We hope this helps you get ready for farmer’s market season.
Come see us at the market this Saturday! We hope to see you there 🙂
We have two more new high tunnels put up – almost. So there are two new smaller high tunnels that we are putting up. Unfortunately, it continues to be a little bit cold. We’ve had it snow while working on these tunnels several times. Here’s Ryan winding up some string after setting the posts for one of the buildings in concrete.
As of Thursday and Friday’s rain/snow, our plans of skinning the building (putting plastic over the high tunnel) were officially changed. When the weather is cool, the plastic is brittle and tight. If we put plastic on while its cool and then the weather heats up, the plastic will loosen up too, and as Ryan says, flap in the wind like your “wearing your grandmother’s underwear.” I’m pretty sure that he means the plastic will flap in the wind!
But what do you do when you already have plants ready to go into the ground and your high tunnel doesn’t have plastic on it yet? Well you plant it of course! We are hopeful that we will get plastic on this building and the building adjacent to it by the end of this week. In the mean time, we have things growing all over the place. Check out how well the tomatoes are doing in the greenhouse!
Its only three weeks until the first farmer’s market in Lincoln. We hope to see you there. Even our cabbage is excited to see you at the start of the new season.
Now we just have to keep the snow away 🙂
We are excited to announce our 2015 Lincoln CSA pickup location will be at Schillingbridge Cork and Tap! Don’t know what a CSA is? Visit our CSA blog post here or look at our flyer.
Schillingbridge Cork and Tap is going to be an amazing partner to work with. They have a great menu and amazing drink selections. Look at this beautiful patio they have – if you sign up for a weekly bag of vegetables from Pekarek’s Produce for this year in Lincoln, you will pick up your vegetables here.
So, how do you sign up for a weekly bag of vegetables?
Remember these pretty frames from over by Omaha? Well we’ve made something of one of them.
During our set of nice days, before the rain and snow, we got this tunnel completed!
We had some great help putting up garage doors and walk in doors.
Here we are putting on the roll down sides. They work like a charm and can passively regulate temperature in the building.
Some tips and tricks of the trade we like to make you try to figure out yourselves. So I’ll let you just guess what Ryan is working on here.
Putting up the endwall plastic and covering the building with plastic requires the most bodies on site. There was about a 2-5 mph wind the day we pulled plastic over the tunnel and the picture shows how Laura and I are flying a giant plastic kite! Thanks to Miss Margret for taking this pic.
So wouldn’t you know it, the weather was nice a sunny… We had 60s. We had 70s. We even had some 80s. So we got excited on the farm. We started planting in the greenhouse.
We’ve got the benches full of transplants.
We finished putting up a high tunnel.
We got started on two more tunnels. Ryan even planted radishes – and now: SNOW!
Hopefully we’ll catch you all on the sunny side soon!
I hope you are as excited as we are…it’s time to sign up for your weekly bag of vegetables!
If you ate your veggies as part of the 2012/2013/2014 CSA, you should already have received a flyer and signup sheet in the mail. If you are new or looking for a different way to sign up, you can:
We’d love to talk to you, so if you have any questions feel free to call or stop by the farm. Hope to hear from you soon!
Some of you will recall from last year, that one of our late fall activities included tearing down a couple of greenhouses near Bennington. This was some sort of crazy adventure where we thought, “Yes. I do believe I would like to go into a weedy field, traipse around in the mud, crawl on loaders and use bobcats to ‘gently’ tear down some greenhouse frames.” This was a labor of love.
Concrete poured on high tunnel posts.
We did get all of the frames taken down and brought home. We currently have the large frame up and have been waiting to get it skinned. The weather has to be right when you put plastic on. If it is too windy, you will never get it to lay down right. If it is to cold, the plastic will be shrunk. This means that on the first warm day, the plastic will loosen and we would have a floppy greenhouse. We can’t have that!
Hopefully, we will put up the two smaller tunnels soon too!
It is a wonderful reprieve to have such wonderful weather in March. I think we’ve all been waiting to break out of the cold snap and it’s really made us productive during the last week. The entire family participated in filling up much of the greenhouse. It all started with a soil delivery that came in February.
We had a few things planted before this week, so the greenhouse looked like this. The pots in the middle are not planted yet, but are scheduled to have tomatoes and cucumbers in them shortly.
The entire family worked to fill trays with soil.
Then we covered them with soil before watering.
At the end of it all, the greenhouse was starting to get full.
These little seedlings will grow in the greenhouse until we are ready to plant them in the field. By the time they are ready, they should look more like this.
