First a quick apology. As many of you have noticed the weather hasn’t been its usual self these days. My bad. We’ve been experiencing some “glitches” in our weather control system (the WCS 10000) that seems to cause it to randomly reboot. And as you all know, when it reboots it resets to January 1st. On the bright side this has been a warm January! We’re not sure if it is a hardware or software problem but we hope to have it fixed shortly. In the meantime, please work around the weather the best you can. We should have it up and running within the next month or two – as long as we can get the replacement parts. Much like all the other equipment on the farm, our weather control system is older than I am.
What else have we been working on other than trying to fix the WCS 10000? Well, we’ve been moving plants around quite a bit. We’ve even put a few of them into the ground… in the hoop house. We put in melons and tomatoes with some lettuce between the plants. We came close to transplanting the onions into the field but decided with the cold January weather there’s the potential to lose all the onions (though they are pretty frost tolerant once they are hardened off); we felt it wasn’t worth the risk. The cold weather also prodded us into covering the hoop house plants with a double layer of floating row covers. This should keep them warm enough to survive until the weather control system is repaired.
What else have we planted? Well, the Potato Planting Party on Monday was a success though only the farm workers got to enjoy the festivities. I was surprised more people didn’t get a sudden sore throat that required them to stay home from work on such a beautiful day. We had the WCS settings tweaked perfectly that day! But it could also have been the short notice and your need to follow us either on Facebook or Twitter to get the message. Hopefully next year will be more conducive to Spring member events.
Beside potatoes we also planted snap peas, snow peas, carrots and parsnips in the ground. Since we direct seed them they should be fine as long as we get the WCS 10000 fixed quickly to prevent a long, cold wet streak; this could cause the seeds to rot. That is pretty much as far as we got in planting in the field this year.
I’m not sure when we will do the corn greenhouse seeding. It will not be this weekend though that is for sure. Unlike a lot of other plants, corn transplants have a small window of opportunity to be successfully transplanted. Too soon and they are too small to hold the soil around their roots. Too late and they get stunted and don’t grow well. Usually – though it depends on the variety – we transplant the corn 10-14 days after they are seeded in the greenhouse. Until we have a confirmed repair plan for the WCS 10000 we’ll have to put this off. I’m starting to think this piece of equipment is more important to the farm than the tractor!
Announcements time!
Herbs should be ready in about two weeks (say the week of May 13th). Stay tuned.
Payments are due unless you made other arrangements. Please send in your payment at your earliest convenience.
Keep sending in films and links to films for our Fresh Earth Farms First Annual Fall Film Fest. We have four films so far. It could either be a short film fest or we’ll have to watch them over and over again.
We are still taking orders for all our shares: Veggie, Fruit, Meat, Cheese, Salmon, Egg, Flower (Mother’s Day is coming up!), Winter, Coffee. Prices are on our order form. To add any of these items just send me an email; no need to fill out an order form. Shoreview is sold out, unless we use different boxes that take up less vehicle room. Other days/locations have room but could fill fast. If you plan to rejoin and haven’t yet please do so quickly. If you have friends/neighbors, etc. who mentioned an interest send them our way soon. It looks like we will sell out this year (though keep selling until we do).
We like referrals. In fact we like them so much we credit your account $25 for every new member referred to us by you. Don’t be shy. Please spread the word!
Be sure to check out/use/etc. all our social media sites — or not. Here is the list:
www.FreshEarthFarms.com www.facebook.com/FreshEarthFarms www.twitter.com/FreshEarthFarms www.YouTube.com/FreshEarthFarms www.Pinterest.com/FreshEarthFarms FreshEarthFarms.tumblr.com
As always do not hesitate to contact me with questions, comments, jokes, brain teasers, etc. In the meantime, I’ll be busy installing the new part on the WCS 10000.