In the past week we have made great progress around the farm. We made our first trial of a home made plastic mulch layer I designed for our cultivating tractor and it worked very well. We planted sweet potatoes into the mulch. The plastic should keep down the weeds, and unlike other plastics, will biodegrade into the soil over the course of the summer. We’ll keep you posted as to how it works out, hopefully with a huge crop of sweet potatoes! We had a small crew planting the winter squash, about 2,800′ of it! And two of our fields that will be fallow this summer were sown to an innovative cover crop cocktail mix of sunflowers, millet, cowpeas, sudan grass and oats. This mixture will hopefully grow well, add lots of organic matter to the soil, suppress weeds, and improve the tilth of the soil to provide better growing conditions for next season. Now that most of the big plantings have happened, we’ll focus on maintaining what’s in the ground, and that means weeding!
Most of the garlic was ready to harvest so we got it out and up in the barn. Catching garlic at the right stage for harvest is a bit of an art because the part you want to be just right is under the ground. For the first time we used our “potato” digger to undercut the garlic. The machine was designed with potatoes, onion, & garlic in mind, but we just had never dared try it. It is too narrow to undercut all three rows of garlic we plant in each bed, so we forked one row and then came back with the digger. It worked great! What took four or five people 30 minutes of hard work, we did in 10 minutes with one person sitting on the tractor! Most of our garlic this year is Chesnok Red, a variety (like most) from the country of Georgia.
The first round of melons went into the ground on Thursday. There will be another round going in in about two weeks. Next week there’s lots more to be planted: popcorn, sweet corn, more cucumbers, sunflowers, lettuce, and more flowers.
Please let us know if you’re planning on coming out to the farm potluck party. It’s always a good time!