No time to write the newsletter yesterday. With the nice weather on Tuesday I spent the whole day farming and couldn’t find the time to break away to write this. So here I am early Wednesday morning putting something together.
Most of the crops are looking pretty good. The one crop that is doing exceptionally are the weeds. We had a pretty good handle on them prior to the latest round of wet weather — the round that started in April. Actually about two weeks ago the fields looked fairly weed-free for an organic farm. But with wet soil and the need to harvest, the weeds multiplied and grew quickly. My hope is that we have about a week of dry weather to try to catch-up. Of course we also still have to plant the fall crops. We tried last week but could not find a time when the soil was dry enough to till and plant. So we’re hoping for Thursday afternoon. If anyone is interested in lending a hand come on out. The weather is forecasted to be perfect.
But back to the weeds. The weeds we have seem to get really big this time of year. What was once a missed half-inch long blade of grass is now a three foot tall, multi-stem bunch of grass. It doesn’t take too many missed half-inch long blades of grass to quickly overrun an onion field. But also at this time of year we have to balance the desire for a weed free field with the time to create one and divide that by the time left for that particular crop. In other words the question is, “Will the effort to eradicate these weeds proportionately positively effect the outcome of this crop?”
What does this mean? Well, we’ll focus on any of the long term crops that are weedy. There is no need to eradicate the weeds in the early broccoli. We’ll harvest the rest of this in the next week or two. However there is a great need to eradicate the weeds in the leeks. These have another two plus months of growing to do and they don’t compete well with weeds. Fortunately we already spent the effort to weed the leeks so they are looking good. As are the tomatoes. The peppers are about 4/5ths of the way weeded. The eggplants could use a little help but overall they are in reasonable shape — being big plants, eggplants are pretty good at competing with weeds.
The corn is an interesting situation. The first planting of corn should be harvested next week or so. It is mildly weedy; really not too bad. The second planting of corn is really weedy. During a spell of constant rain it happened to grow taller than our tractor could drive over it. So we couldn’t eradicate the weeds in that planting. We did drive through with the cultivating tractor at one point but just as I was finishing it started to rain. A lot of the weeds just rerooted and continued to grow. It was a mostly futile effort. On the positive side, corn does compete fairly well with weeds. We currently have four corn harvesters named Rebecca, Simon, Nick and Chris — none of which is mechanical. So the weeds just make it harder to harvest. The third planting of corn looks pretty good with regard to weeds. We hit it with the cultivator at just the right time when the plants weren’t too tall and either were the weeds.
We also did pretty well with the watermelons and winter squash. The melons don’t compete well with weeds but we finished weeding them last week. The winter squash grows awfully big so it can compete. None the less, we did get through all of them with the tractors before they started vining and most of them with hoeing.
The peas are completely overrun but they will be done in the next week or at most two; we will then till under all the pea beds. The carrots are 90% weeded. This is great since carrots do not compete well with weeds. We just planted the last of the carrots so we will have more weeding to do later this summer. The beans are doing well in the weed category. They are just starting to flower so we should get some in two weeks or so.
The rest of the fields are a mixed bag. Some are pretty free of weeds — celery for instance — and some are quite weedy — unfortunately beets. However is we could get a crew of about 100 farm members out here for an hour or so we’d have a nice clean field. Which hundred of you would like to volunteer?
What will we have this week? I am hoping potatoes. We’ll have to see if the ground is dry enough to get through with the tractor. We’ll also have fennel, cucumbers, squash/zucchini, peas, broccoli, onions, kohlrabi, radishes, and maybe by the end of the week (next Monday) sweet corn. Most of these things will be either ramping up (e.g. cucumbers) or ramping down (peas) so not many items will be in great abundance.
What other shares will there be this week? CoffeeShare and FlowerShare.
Salmon and Seafood come at the end of the month.
That is all for now. Here is an old farmer joke (the joke is old, not the farmer…)
There was a farmer who grew watermelons. He was doing pretty well, but he was disturbed by some local kids who would sneak into his watermelon patch at night and eat his watermelons. After some careful thought, he came up with a clever idea that he thought would scare the kids away for sure. He made up a sign and posted it in the field. The next day, the kids show up and they saw the sign which read, “Warning! One of the watermelons in this field has been injected with cyanide.” The kids ran off, made up their own sign and posted it next to the farmer’s sign. When the farmer returned, he surveyed the field. He noticed that no watermelons are missing, but the sign next to his read, “Now there are two!”