Lots of good farming weather. Find out what we did with all of it this past week. But first, here are a few announcements:
Season start: I don’t yet know when the season will start. I should know the first week of June. Expect to receive an email sometime then with the start date and pick-up instructions for your pick-up location.
Shares still available so spread the word.
We have eggs available!
Only two EggShares left for this season. Let me know if you want to order them.
Speaking of shares, you can still order FruitShare, CheeseShare, MeatShare (though we are close to sold out), FlowerShare, WinterShare and CoffeeShare. A la carte fruit is also available for purchase. See the order form for pricing. No need to fill out a form, just send me an email with your order then follow-up with payment.
Herb plants are ready for pick-up for those who ordered them. Check your email for details.
Farm News: We spent the first part of the day yesterday (Monday) planting sweet corn. We transplant sweet corn, which is very time consuming and labor intensive. We’ve found that we can get earlier corn and a better stand. The benefit of earlier corn is two-fold. First, we get to eat it earlier. Second, most years the corn earworms haven’t arrived in MN by the time the corn is ready so we eliminate that pest from the equation. Unfortunately this isn’t always the case and probably only successful for the last planting 50% of the time. But for the first two plantings it seems to be pretty effective.
We finished planting right as the rain came down hard enough to make the mud stick to our boots, and knees, and hands, and any place else that touched the mud. But at least we finished! Following the corn planting we built tomato cages. Members from last season may recall our plan to cage our tomatoes. In past years the plants had a tendency to wander off the farm so we felt putting them in cages will prevent this from happening. Actually the purpose is to get the plants off the ground. When we grow them in our hoop house we use the hoop house structure and twine to keep them growing in an upward direction. Out in the field we’ve tried many different styles of trellis systems none of which proved reliable, economical and effective. So this season we are using home-built tomato cages.
We created the cages out of concrete reinforcement mesh. This gives us a 5 foot high cage with 6 inch openings. The wire is quite sturdy and should last many seasons. The downside is we get about 27 cages out of a $100 worth of mesh. If we were to cage all 500 tomato plants we’d spend $2,000 just on the mesh! That is some expensive produce! So instead of risking $2,000 this season we figured we’d try it on a row of tomatoes (approximately 100 plants) to see if it works as well as we hope. If so, we will create 400 more for next season. Stay tuned to see how it turns out!
What else is happening on the farm? Last week we transplanted the celery and celeriac which is new this season. We also transplanted the lettuce under our new deer resistant structure (see picture above). So far it has kept the deer away. I feel they could easily rip through it if they wanted to. I suspect the goofy looking poles are keeping them at bay – no tracks nearby so far. We also transplanted the bok choi. We cover the bok choi with floating row covers – lightweight spun fabric – to keep the flea beetles off the plants. Flea beetles love bok choi. It’s like flea beetle fudge dipped in chocolate!
In addition to all the planting it is now time to cultivate and hoe. This is perfect weed growing weather – rainy, warm and sunny. We’ve cultivated most of the plants we planted prior to last week. We still have many rows to hoe. Hopefully we can get to much of it this week. However, competing for our time will also be transplanting all the warm season crops – tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, squash, flowers, etc. This is one of the busiest weeks here on the farm and is typically the week where all our planning and preparation become irrelevant as the weeds take advantage of our focus on getting all these plants planted. Those weeds are a clever bunch I must say. If anyone is looking for some fresh air and sunshine this week do not hesitate to volunteer. We have plenty to do. Plus, it sounds like you have a bit of a cold coming on, no? Might need to take some time off of work to recuperate.
Well, that is enough for now. This week’s joke: Why didn’t anyone laugh at the farmer’s jokes? Because they were too corny.