I hope everyone is enjoying the extra hour of daylight courtesy of the recently passed COVID-19 federal stimulus bill. I know our plants are certainly enjoying it!
Here are a few announcements followed by a few updates on the progress we are making during this indoor Spring training season.
We still have a few shares left. If you plan to join please do so soon. You can order from our online farmstand or if you are a returning member by sending in a check for the amount due.
Final payment is due this month unless you are on a payment plan. If you don’t know what you owe shoot me an email.
We are taking orders for all our add-on shares except for the Amish JamShare. It is a little more difficult to get updates from them so you’ll have to be a bit more patient. We do have FruitShare, EggShare, ShroomShare, FlowerShare, CoffeeShare, and WinterShare. Order through our online store or send me an email with a follow-up payment, either works fine.
If there are other items you’d like us to carry let me know and I can look around for appropriate suppliers. If you know of a farm/business selling something you think our membership would be interested in please let me know as well. Typically it should be farm or food related, and preferably legal, unlike this product.
Farm Update
The greenhouse is just starting to live up to its name, specifically we have a few green items germinating and reaching toward the sunlight! It never really lost the house part of its name since it could in a pinch be used to house most anything. But the green part had been lacking this winter, but no more!
So far we have planted onions, scallions, shallots, leeks, bs (that’s Brussels sprouts for the uninitiated), broccoli, beets, oregano, thyme, flat parsley, curly parsley (why does parsley have an “e” ‘tween the “l” and the “y” but curly doesn’t?), the hotter peppers (they typically germinate slower than the less hot ones like jalapenos), rosemary (actually we start rosemary from cuttings), and maybe some things I am forgetting. This week we will plant a bunch of cabbages, cauliflower, and various flowers for FlowerShare. It might also be time to plant the hoop house tomatoes.
One thing we are doing in some of the seeding cases is processing the seeds in a hot water bath prior to seeding them into the trays. I’ve discussed this in a few prior newsletters. The process has been going fairly well but there is a bit of a learning curve like, some seeds float so make sure they can’t float out the top of the mesh bag. I’ve solved this issue by double bagging the seeds. Since the bags are reusable and I bought 100 of them I don’t expect the double bagging will be an issue. I did the onion seeds and they have mostly germinated, so I think the process isn’t killing our seeds. I think it is going to get a little trickier when I get to the tomatoes since we grow somewhere north or 20 difference varieties. Keeping track of each variety could be a bit messy.
Other than seeding in the greenhouse we are hiring employees, buying inputs and putting together a list of projects we’d like to complete this year. One that I just added to the list is installation of louvers or high doors on our hoop house. I feel even with both end doors open and the sides rolled up it still gets too hot inside on the really warm sunny days. Too much heat causes the tomatoes to get yellow shoulders and hard white interiors. I don’t know if this will fix the problem but it should help.
That’s pretty much it for now. As always, feel free to send in questions, comments, suggestions, unmarked $20 bills, jokes, etc. We love to hear from you!