In this newsletter we will discuss succession planting. But first, here are a few brief announcements:
Fruit-of-the-looms are now on sale! (I said a few brief announcements).
As mentioned before we are sold out of veggie shares for the season but have plenty of fruit, egg, jam, coffee, and shrooms available. There are also a few flower shares left. Please consider these add-ons to your veggies since they are not only delicious but also support small, local producers — yes even the coffee is from a local family business! And if you plan to purchase them please do so sooner rather than later. We will start labeling delivery boxes (for drop site members) next week and having your complete order ahead of time prevents possible mislabeling mistakes. Let me know if you have any questions!
I don’t yet know exactly which week we will start the season but it will most likely be the week of June 21st. Stay tuned in case this changes.
In the next few weeks (or maybe days) I will be figuring out the email newsletter delivery situation. I’ll try not to use you as test animals (no harm will be done to you either way) but if you get a random test email by mistake please accept my apologies ahead of time.
Farm News
This week I figured I’d talk about successions. Most of us know the meaning of succession as the peaceful transfer of power in a democracy. We’ve all lived through this process — unless you are a couple years old — so we know what a succession looks like. The definition of succession I am referring to though is “a number of persons or things following one another in order or sequence”. And the “persons or things” I’m referring to are vegetable plants (and some flowers as well).
With succession planting we plant the same type of plant at intervals so that the plants mature over time. A good example is broccoli. We plant four successions of broccoli so we can have broccoli for four to many weeks depending on how well it does. Succession planting is especially important for CSA farms. Though we’d like to give you a box full of cabbage every couple of weeks we’ve found that doing this results in fewer returning members and more recruiting required in the winter. So, we stopped filling the boxes full of cabbage and started filling them full of kale. Using kale we have the same detrimental effect of losing members BUT kale is significantly lighter so we have that going for us, which is nice.
BREAKING NEWS: The National Weather Service has issued a patchy frost warning for Fresh Earth Farms starting Saturday at 4 am. Anyone willing to come to the farm and cuddle with some of our frost sensitive plants would be quite welcome. We will stay on top of this story and report back when there are new developments. We now return you to our regular broadcast.
Actually we never did either of these things. Instead we try to pack the shares with a wide variety of veggies so that each week is different resulting — hopefully — in satisfied customers and far less wintertime recruiting. Using succession planting helps us achieve this.
Succession planting is one of the two methods we use for achieving what I am going to call succession harvesting — the harvesting of a given type of vegetable spread over time. This is the important part of successions, the harvesting. As described previously, succession planting allows us to provide multiple weeks of broccoli by planting multiple plantings spread out over time. But, we also use another technique to provide succession harvests — days to maturity. Different varieties of the same plant can mature at different rates. By our using differing maturity rates we can plant multiple harvest successions with one planting. We do his with cabbage for example. We grow five or six different varieties of cabbage that mature at five or six different rates resulting in cabbages available over 10 plus weeks — all with one planting of cabbage.
We also do this with sweet corn but sweet corn has an attribute that makes it difficult to plant it all at once then harvest it over multiple weeks — its pollination scheme. Unlike many other vegetables, corn is wind pollinated. The wind dislodges pollen from the tassel — the spiky point at the top of the plant — to then fall on the silk part that is along the side of the plant. The silk part is where the ear of corn forms. The problem with planting all the corn at once is that some varieties need isolation from other varieties so they don’t cross pollinate. For example, if we plant sugar enhanced corn next to an augmented Sh2 corn and it cross pollinates the Sh2 corn will be tough. And so far we have not found many members who join for the tough corn.
We can isolate the different varieties by either distance or time. We plant our popcorn far from and down wind of the sweet corn so it wont cross and mess up the sweet corn. But we also plant different varieties of sweet corn and plant them next to each other but we spread out the varieties with several weeks between each planting — succession planting. With this succession planting plus the later plantings having longer days to maturity, the likelihood of crossing is minimized and more importantly we don’t have to give you a whole box of corn once per season.
The reason I bring this up today is that with all the wet weather we’ve been having we are running out of indoor tasks. So one idea was to catch up on the indoor seeding of transplants that needs to be done next week. But this won’t work. The planting we need to do next week is follow-on successions to some of the plants we’ve already planted. By planting these successions this week the plants will mature too early and mess up our succession planting scheme. We would be back to the box full of cucumbers for instance. So trying to stay ahead of the greenhouse seeding at this time unfortunately doesn’t work. Perhaps next week when there is beautiful weather we may be in the greenhouse seeding cucumbers or sweet corn instead of hoeing or cultivating like we need to after all this rain. From the looks of it, nature has planted a huge succession of weeds.
If you have successfully read this newsletter about succession planting — and harvesting –you deserve the following joke from one of our members:
Waiter: ‘What would you like from the menu?”
Patron: ‘I’ll take the fermented beet salad please.”
Waiter returns with salad and places it on the table.
Patron: “Hey man, thanks for laying down those funky beets!”
As always, feel free to send in your questions, comments, suggestions, brain teasers and jokes. I don’t want any complaining about the jokes from people who don’t contribute!