 Cucumber & Summer Squash enjoying the warmth under a temporary “greenhouse”.  planting some lettuce mix (usually done with a mechanical transplanter so the rows are a little more straight!) We hope everyone has enjoyed last week’s box and are ready for this one!
We got a phone call from another farmer on Tuesday morning asking for advice. Unfortunately we couldn’t offer much help. Every season brings new challenges. Some are easier to deal with than others. This spring has been exceptionally cool and wet. As many of you have probably seen in the Citizen-Times, this spring is the third wettest since 1875. Water is a blessing and a curse to the farmer. There is almost never the correct amount freely given by mother nature. It’s either too much or too little and never timed to our liking. Our friend’s, other farmers, had called saying that nothing they had planted had grown much in the last few weeks and they had nothing to sell or offer their CSA members. We are a little more lucky, in that we have been able to take produce to market and put together two weeks worth of boxes for you all. However, we may be in the same boat as them in the coming weeks.
We were able to get a lot of early planting done because we made a few good decisions last fall. We had beds made up then, so we’d have them in the early spring when the ground is generally too wet to work with a tractor. We also covered much of the early planting with row covers to keep them warmer. But we had only so much space to plant into, and that was filled up weeks ago and we haven’t been able to get anything in since. Thankfully that did change on Wednesday and Thursday of this week. We were able to plant a LOT: a bed of sunflowers, broccoli, cabbage, chard, two beds of sweet corn, a mixed bed of lettuce mix, bok choi & kohlrabi, and a couple of beds of mixed flowers. We also sowed beets, carrots, soybeans, and snap beans. What a couple of days we’ve had. What we’re afraid of is a gap in production and some tough or unpleasant choices we may have to make concerning your boxes. Perhaps all will be fine, but being farmers, we worry.
Please return your CSA box next week. These boxes are waxed and are not recyclable, but we reuse them. So PLEASE remember to bring them back next week.
 Sami & Ben harvesting flowers  Andrew doing the same, with onions & garlic in the background. Here we go again! The box this week looks pretty good to us. We hope you all enjoy it.
We had a little bit of a hard time finding our crew this year, but in the end we have a great crew. You’ll see them at market on a rotating basis or if you come out to the farm we’ll be able to work with them. We have Sammy from Maryland, working her first full season on a farm after a couple of shorter stints on farms in the Northeast. Andrew from Connecticut, the pianist. He’s joining us after working on a small farm in Vermont. And Ben, from Virginia, whose interest in farming started after working on a Zen retreat center in the Bay area. We have one more intern joining us a little later in the season, Maggee, an Asheville native.
Everyone was happy to have the sun come out over the past few days. We’re not able to do many of the tasks we’d like to be doing: planting more vegetable starts, but we have spent our time doing jobs in drier portions of the farm. We trellised all the greenhouse tomatoes, made drying racks for the onions and garlic that will come out in the next few weeks, as well as digging quite a few little ditches trying to drain various wet areas of the farm.
Please return your CSA box next week. These boxes are waxed and are not recyclable, but we reuse them. So PLEASE remember to bring them back next week.
October! Here we are in the home stretch. All the strawberries and over-winter flowers were planted last week and watered in. Tuesday’s big rain made sure everything got plenty of water! The cover crops are up and growing. We spent much on Monday of this week digging sweet potatoes. We dug somewhere between 600-700# of sweet spuds in one bed. There’s still a bed and a half left to dig. We grew three varieties this year: Beauregard, Georgia Jet, and Centennial. The Centennial’s have a very light ora skin to them, where the Georgia Jet’s are pretty close to fushia, and the Beauregard is more of a light brown. They all seemed to grow very well this season with some individual tubers weighing in at 3 or 4#!
We’re finally going to break ground on the farm pond next Wednesday. What a process it has been. Yikes. It should take about a week to finish the work, and by the end of the month we should have a full pond. We’ll let it settle over the winter and we’ll dig a new header line connecting the current system to a spot close to the pond where our pump can be set up. Next season we will have reliable and clean water, no more worries about what’s happening up stream from us.
Clean up is the name of the game at this point in the season. We’re taking down the tomatoes in the greenhouses, cleaning & folding up landscape fabric, mowing down the last of the summer crops, and rolling up a little more drip tape. There are a few more things going in the ground before the end: garlic & onions will go in around the 15th and there are some more lettuces & kales to plant in the greenhouses for our late December markets and to sustain the farmers over the winter.
It’s now officially fall, and the weather outside has been beautiful, cool clear mornings giving way to warm, blue skies in the afternoon. What an amazing time be be working outside! We’re getting closer to the time when the work load is less intense, there’s always more to do than there’s hours in the day, but there is a sense that we’ll get to it all eventually. All the fall crops have been weeded and thinned. With a little luck and some regular watering there will be spinach in the next couple of weeks. And hey, the surprise sweet corn in the boxes this week is our best all season! It seems like the carrots will be ready next week and there’s three beds out there, so there should be carrots in the all the remaining boxes.
The irrigation system is back together and working well. All the little plants are growing well now. Many of the crops that are growing now really enjoy the cooler temperatures and often taste better and a little sweeter once they’ve gotten a little frosted. All the strawberries are planted and eatered in, ready to grow and produce lots of berries for next year! We also planted quite a lot of over-winter flowers! All we have left are the onions and garlic in mid-Octobe and a few things to plant in the greenhouse.
There are 4 weeks left in the CSA season.
That was some rain. We slogged it out Tuesday morning harvesting in the continuous downpour. The rain was actually great and came just in time, though a bit heavy. The engine to our irrigation system died, and the replacement engine had not been put back into the system. So all the plants were really ready for some water by the time it started to rain last night. We’ll get the system set up and ready for the next dry spell, but we have some breathing room now. I spent all day on Sunday discing and moving landscape fabric out of fields in preparation for sowing the winter cover crops. Monday morning I zipped into town to pick up the seed, raced home, mixed up all the different seeds (hairy vetch, crimson clover, austrian winter pea, winter wheat, and tillage radish), spread them over all the empty fields, then harrowed all those spaces to cover the seeds and smooth out the ground a little. Done! Just before the rains began. Most of the farm is ready for winter. There are still plenty of projects and produce to keep us busy for the next two months or more.
Some much cooler weather is headed our way on Wednesday, low in the mid-40s! That’s a big change. Many of the fall crops will really like the cooler temperatures. The greens will sweeten up a bit, the spinach will continue to grow well. The weeds which we have been fighting a losing battle against will start to slow down and perhaps we can get ahead of them. We received the strawberry plants last week. Those beds are already made up and ready to plant the strawberries in. We have over-wintering flowers that are ready to go in as well. The onions and garlic will go in sometime in early to mid-October.
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