Fare Thee Well to Peas

Reveries

Jul 21

Highlights from last week:

Half an inch of rain Monday night after an an afternoon's worth of despair hopelessly helplessly watching the radar and seeing storms bypass us to the north. Then it came! Monday at sundown, a thunderstorm with dark foreboding clouds whipped through and glugged down .5" of fresh rain, setting us and the week's harvest up for success.

Fare thee well to peas it was a hard goodbye to our pea crop - the quality and quantity had a steep decline after that hot and dry stretch, but we plucked the remaining good fruits and brought them to market. It's always difficult to say goodbye to one of our best-tasting, best-yielding and highest profit-margin crops, but it's fun to grow with the seasons, and though the spring highlights are now behind us, the farmer gaze is now toward the summer cucurbits and solanaceous crops. After the last harvest, we quickly began dismantling their trellis netting and collecting the metal stakes out of the field. We will recycle these beds by mulching all the plant matter back into the soil and grow some Fall vegetables.

Garlic harvest on Thursday, while Miranda and our market volunteer all-stars Laura and Tricia held things down with a smile in Exeter, Bria and I pulled the garlic crop from the field. It was a crop. Not good, not horrible, but a crop. Many lessons learned here, from soil type, to the Earth's pitch and garden-bed-face, to does straw even do anything for weed suppression? We harvested all the bulbs, and it ran quite the spectrum of size. We are chipping away at cleaning them up, and clipping off their fronds, while we let them cure.

Cultivation pass on winter squash and potatoes I was able to get some cultivation done on some big crops. The squash have been putting on lots of new growth and are vining out and consuming the 5' of space we plant them on. I was able to drive over them carefully with some sweets towed behind the tractor to clear/uproot any grasses or purslane or other summer weeds that had germinated since we planted them. For the potatoes, I hilled them with some coulters and a disc to drag more soil to the base of the plants in hopes they'll set more tubers, and I then I had to do a following pass with sweets to keep the weeds at bay between rows. There's a carpet of weeds out there, but the potatoes are, for now at least, dominating the overstory.

Bridging the Gap

Feeling Generous? Want to help those experiencing hunger in our community? Want to support a small organic farm? Our fundraiser with Gather is still active! If you have the means to support our mission of bringing Gather more produce we ask that you please consider donating. Any amount is helpful! $5 could help someone get a meal. $500 would be a summer's worth of meals. To support the fundraiser, click the link below, thank you!!

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