Spring seemed to have passed us by, it was well over 80 degrees today! The farm has really come alive over the past week or so. We’re all moving around with renewed purpose. Though Spring has only officially been around for a couple of weeks, we’re preparing to move onto the Summer crops. By this time next week all the peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, basil, summer flowers, second round of squash and cukes, and many more crops will be planted or sown. The last frost date for our area is May 15th, so we’re feeling pretty safe about putting as much in the ground as fast as we can manage. Because of the challenging weather some of our crops aren’t doing as well as we had hoped, while others are exceeding our expectations. That is the way of growing things. Our best laid plans, based on years of experience, can unravel over the coarse of a few weeks or over night, due to heat, frost, too much rain, too little rain, insects, diseases: all aspects of farming that we can’t control.
We have included a basil transplant in each of your boxes this week. Last season we had a terrible problem with a new mildew (more info at http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu/NewsArticles/BasilDowny.html and some cool pictures too) that attacked our and most commercial growers’ basil up and down the east coast. It is a downy mildew and causes the leaves to turn yellow and I think to loose its flavor as well. To try to insure that you all get enough basil to put up some pesto, our plan is to plant one big planting early in the season and to get you all as much basil as possible before the disease can get established. So that you have some supply during the summer, we’re giving each one of you your own basil plant grow out. We had good luck with our plants beside the house last year. Maybe you will too.
It seems like I’ve been writing a good bit about how things can go wrong, but many, many things are going right this season. There are some exciting crops just over the horizon like Sugar Snap peas, Broccoli Raab, Garlic Scapes, and Kohlrabi. Our over-wintering onions have started to bulb up and are looking beautiful.
We have 10 different fields out here on the farm ranging from a 1/4 acre to 3/4 acres in size. We rotate all the crops around the farm so that everything is in a different spot from the previous year (not an easy task to figure it out). Some of the fields we fallow for an entire season to let the soil rest and we use cover crops to improve the fertility. Monday we sowed three of those fallow fields to buckwheat. We’ve timed the sowing of the buckwheat so that in about a month it will be flowering. Mid June is a time when there isn’t any other major nectar flow for our bees, so hopefully our girls will be making almost pure buckwheat honey. This has a really unique flavor which some of us really like.
The next berries - sometime in June!
The first little cherry tomatoes!
Ideas for Cooking
Those greens would go nicely sauteed with a spring onion, some olive oil, and a dash or two of vinegar. We like to put toasted sesame seeds on the greens as well. I’ve heard that frying up the collards with some onions and bacon is rather tasty.
I hope to really get serious with some recipes for next week. Hope you can find some inspiration!
PLEASE REMEMBER TO RETURN YOUR BOX!