We had a pretty big planting week late last week. With the help of some worker members we planted 3 beds of field tomatoes, 2 beds of peppers, a bed each of eggplant, cucumbers, summer squash, lettuce, sunflowers, and a whole assortment of other flowers and some basil as well. About half of the winter squash was sown on Monday. We’ll finally get to planting the first round of sweet corn on Wednesday morning. If we get the rest of the winter squash beds covered with the bio-degradeable “plastic” we’ll sow those this week as well. Amongst all the planting we did raise our heads away from planting and started to tackle all the weeds that have come up. That fight will occupy us for much of the rest of the season.
Looking into the future, near and far, there will be summer squash coming along. The very first will be at market on Wednesday. Cucumbers will be a week or so after the squash really begin to produce. So look for squash in the CSA boxes either next week or the week after. The high tunnel tomatoes look GREAT. The plants are getting quite large and some have golf ball sized fruit on them. The cherry tomatoes are always ahead of the rest, maybe in 3 weeks the first of the tomatoes will start to show up at market!!!!
As you can see a lot goes on on the farm. But not everything is roses here. There has been a little more than our fair share of mechanical break downs in the past couple of weeks. First the flail mower broke all three of its belts, and melted a pulley. I’m currently attempting to fix the pulley with apoxy resin and sand paper. We’ll see how that goes. The exhaust pipe of one of our tractors has broken off, to be welded back on on Wednesday by a neighbor. And a wheel on the other tractor popped all the lug bolts off, I figured it out just in time (before the wheel fell off). All the replacement parts are now in, at the only Massey Ferguson dealer around, in Greeneville , TN. The joys of farming.
Ideas for Cooking
It’s salad time. Some of those heads of lettuce are monsters!
The green chard tastes a lot like spinach. Since the spinach is now done until fall, the green chard can take its place. It’s an easy substitute.
The sugar snaps can be added to one of your many salads this week, along with the radishes, or could be used in a stir fry.
Enjoy!