With all this beautiful weather outside I don’t have time to write much but felt it was important to get a few things out to you.
First, I’m fairly confident we will start the week of June 19th. Some things like bok choi and radishes are looking like they will be ready by next week. But that doesn’t put much in the shares. So we’ll go with the 19th and hope the radishes and bok choi hold.
Please put in your order for any extra items like fruit, cheese, eggs, ice cream, coffee, flowers, and winter share as soon as possible. If you aren’t sure if you ordered something and would like to make sure it is on your account please feel free to contact me and I can check for you.
We still have a few shares left but not many. If you are reading this and haven’t joined yet, but plan to, do it now otherwise you may miss out.
With this nice weather our indoor project has been on hold for a while. Hopefully we’ll get some much needed rain so that we can finish it off.
I’ll try to send out pick-up instructions later this week (most likely over the weekend).
Farm News
When it rains it pours and when it doesn’t we end up spending time irrigating. At this point in time some plants have been in the ground long enough for their roots to find plenty of moisture. It is down there, just not readily apparent from the surface. But our newer plants struggle to stay alive since they aren’t well established. So we have to give them water until they are well rooted or until we get a good soaking rain to provide that boost necessary to make them successful. Looking at the forecast we don’t see any soaking rains anytime soon. So we are irrigating.
We also are starting our battle with our insect pests. The flea beetles are ramping up and feasting on our brassicas. I saw cucumber beetles yesterday for the first time this spring. Also the Colorado potato beetles have made their appearance. These are our three most destructive pests — at least until the other pests arrive. With the plants relatively small I spent a considerable amount of time walking around spraying them with an organic pesticide PyGanic. PyGanic is derived from chrysanthemums and has a very short residual time — less than 24 hours. It is a contact insecticide so quietly creeping up on the insects works best — not easy to do with a backpack sprayer, but much more effective than using a loud, diesel tractor! Actually we’ll use the tractor once the plants get bigger and have more surface area to reach.
We are also spending considerable time trying to manage the weed pressure. We have some mechanical cultivation capabilities to get within six inches or so of the plants, then it is all about hoeing and hand-weeding. It is a lot of work.
So that’s pretty much our work week here on the farm. Irrigating, pest-killing and weed management. Oh, and we’ll be putting in a few more transplants later this week. Soon we will add harvesting to the mix!
As always, do not hesitate with questions, comments, suggestions, etc.