A Pet Sounds Summer

Reveries

Jun 16

It was a Pet Sounds week and may well be a Pet Sounds summer. And indeed, a much needed quarter inch drizzled its way over the garden Friday night into Saturday morning, thank you B.W.. It was a welcome precip. event as your Roots in Reverie team completed some more big planting projects. On Friday, next to our leeks, we added 300 eggplants (Oriental and Italian varieties), 100 husk cherries, over 1,000 broccoli plants, as well as our next succession of mixed lettuces, bok choy, and radiccio - another 2,000 plants. We filled up a quarter acre of our new plot with this mixture of veggies, and happy to say, it's starting to look like something! Speckled with greens and green-blues, purples, reds, and maroons spaced down tidy rows, a garden plot is beginning to taking shape.

Then on Saturday morning, in that drizzly-mist of late Spring, we established our pepper crop and planted 300 melon seedlings! Much to anticipate in this sweet sweet corner, and we'll do all we can to coax out some high quality fruits come summer. That said, we are experiencing heavy cucumber beetle pressure on the farm, a pest that could find its way to the melons. They've already decimated much of our first try at summer squash/zucchini - those 450 plants have become a breeding ground for these yellow-and-black-backed nuisances. Applications of our organic spray solution made up of pyrethrins derived from chrysanthemums have been deployed to moderate success, and repeat applications will be applied if necessary. We do not want that population to grow, or for them to find our melons. Organic farming is hard!

Earlier in the week, we took advantage of some gray and cool weather to catch up on our high tunnel work. We flipped both our tunnels from spring greens to summer crops. One tunnel now features cucumbers and the other, tomatoes. Happy to say, we aren't seeing any rodent damage in our cukes (yet), because you may remember the fateful truths that befell us this time last year - our cucumbers were wiped out entirely in the 48 hours after planting them. Here's to a successful cucumber crop! Aside from planting, and cultivation, and fence maintenance, we've been very busy keeping up with the growing harvest from the field - more and more time from our mornings are spent pulling, plunking, snapping, and cutting veggies and ferrying them in from the field. Our wash/pack-out assembly line has seen some upgrades with an additional tented-garage, so we can keep moving efficiently forward when several vans' worth of vegetables are brought in from the field. We look forward to the growing harvest this week, and thanks for reading!