I thought a good topic for this installment of the Fresh Earth Farms newsletter would be our sweet potato experiment. But first a couple announcements:
Final payment is still due if you haven’t made other arrangements.
We still have shares available. All assistance selling the remaining shares would be greatly appreciated! In fact, we will give you a $25 credit for everyone you send our way who signs up! Keep the referrals coming!
We are still taking orders for FruitShare, MeatShare, SeafoodShare, EggShare, FlowerShare, WinterShare, CoffeeShare, and CheeseShare. Please order as soon as possible if you plan to purchase any of these for 2015. They are all great add-ons to your VeggieShares and help support small businesses like our farm!
Herb Six Packs will be ready next week. I will have them available in the normal pick-up area. No need to schedule a time to pick-up (unless you want a tour of the farm); just come by and find the plants with your name on them.
Farm News
As you may recall from last season we grew sweet potatoes for the first time — and it was a wonderful success! Some of you may also recall our frustration in getting this experiment underway. As a quick overview for those who weren’t with us last season or who, like me, have a great memory, just really short, we purchased sweet potato slips (more on what these are later) for planting in our hoop house here on the farm. Despite our request for them to arrive in May we didn’t receive them until the second week of June. This frustration of not having control over the production of one of our products led me to this season’s sweet potato experiment.
This year I am determined to grow our own sweet potato slips. What are slips you ask? These are small stem cuttings of sprouted sweet potato tubers. These slips are what you plant when you grow sweet potatoes. You can just plant the whole sweet potato into the ground but all the little plants will start from one end of the potato resulting in overcrowding and small — if any — sweet potatoes. By cutting and planting the slips you can spread out the plants resulting in more, large sweet potatoes. Plus each sweet potato can grow 10-50 slips! This helps dramatically on the saving of sweet potatoes from one season to the next.
So back to our process. In mid-March I moved the stored sweet potato tubers from cold storage into our heated greenhouse. I checked on them frequently to see if there was any growth. After enough time for me to give up on my experiment the sweet potatoes finally sprouted. That was a relief since I didn’t have a plan B. The potato sprouts grew slowly at first but eventually started to get big enough to cut — about six inches long. Since the hoop house wasn’t warm enough yet to plant the slips I put the slips in small pots and flats to allow them to root and remain viable.
Each week the plants grew faster to where this week we made two cuttings of slips. We are at about 200 slips so far (150 of which were cut this week) with a week or so to go before we start transplanting them — sometime around May 15th. I don’t expect we will get all 500 by the first planting but we certainly should by the end of May. Then we will grow them like we did last season — watering regularly, keeping the hoop house closed except for the really hot days, and harvesting the sweet potatoes around the first frost of the fall. It will be interesting to see if the plants we transplant with root balls do better or worse than newly cut slips.
Other than the sweet potato experiment we are doing a lot of transplanting, direct seeding, greenhouse seeding, cultivating and hoeing. I guess you could just say “farming”; we’re doing a lot of farming. So far we have planted outside (from east to west) potatoes, Brussels sprouts, kale, fall cabbage, leeks, celery, celeriac, lettuce, Swiss chard, kohlrabi, cauliflower, fennel, summer cabbage, beets, snap peas, snow peas, mache, rutabagas, parsnips, carrots, garlic, shallots, onions, and green onions. That’s all outside so far. Still waiting to transplant are more broccoli, more lettuce, bok choi, herbs, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and flowers. Just seeded in the greenhouse this week are winter squash, summers squash, sweet corn, more lettuce, and cucumbers. We’ll plant watermelons as soon as space opens up under the protective mouse-resistant cage.
Everything is looking great! The deer have left some veggies for paying customers. And we got some much needed rain this week. Not a bad start to the 2015 farming season.
Finally, I’m thinking of changing the name of the Fresh Earth Farms Newsletter. The name seems mundane. I have one idea in mind but I’m looking for additional suggestions. If you have any ideas send them my way!
An old joke but a good one: A guy walks into the doctor’s office. A banana stuck in one of his ears, a sweet potato in the other ear, and a carrot stuck in one nostril. The man says, “Doc, this is terrible. What’s wrong with me?” The doctor says, “Well, first of all, you need to eat more sensibly.”