It’s been a busy few days! We’ve gotten many, many plants in the ground! Let’s see…we planted Basil, Tomatoes, Eggplant, Peppers, Summer Squash, Cucumbers, Sweet Corn, sweet potatoes, peanuts (experimental), and many flowers. We also sowed, carrots, beets, lettuce mix, cilantro, radishes, arugula, sorghum, and soybeans. We also had our daughter Belle’s pre-school class out for a field trip on last Thursday. The next couple of fields have been disced and are about ready for the next rounds of plantings and sowings. The winter squash, watermelons and cantaloupe, and popcorn will go in next. We’re moving as fast as we can around here, though there seems to be way too much to do.
Without any rain to speak of over the last week, we’ve been irrigating, though due to a broken gauge on the irrigation pump, the process is a little challenging. We have to have somebody sit down by the pump and press a little button that turns on the back wash feature to fluch out the filters every 7 or 8 minutes. It sounds like a replacement gauge is still a week away. The lack of rain made it easy for our neighbor to cut and bale our hay for us. As we open up more ground to grow produce in, our hay field has shrunk by a few acres, but we still got 200 square bales, half for us and half to the neighbor. We’ll use much of our hay to mulch. Though the hay does contain grass seeds, it’s better than herbicide contaminants that came on straw we’ve purchased in the past. (We put that stuff on the burn pile!) Some hay fields are sprayed with persistent herbicides to kill broad leaf weeds. THese herbicides can stay in the field for YEARS, will move through cows stomachs unaffected and still kill broad leaf plants (like vegetables) that they come in contact with. Last year we used contaminated straw to mulch our tomatoes which made the tomatoes start to grow deformed. We removed all the bad straw and searched for an alternative. We did manage to find some “organic” straw through another farmer, but that wasn’t available this year. This year we are excited to use our own hay, and we know there’s nothing wrong with it.
It looks like this week may be the last week for strawberries. Though we did harvest a good haul for Wednesday, the future harvests look smaller. It’s been an excellent run this Spring for the strawberries. Now we can look forward to the Blueberries!
25 little ones eating all the strawberries they can find
Maggie (on right) & neighbor Katie planting sweet corn
Ideas for Cooking
The potato onions in your box this week are superb slow baked. Place the onions in a baking dish, add some balsamic vinegar, butter, a little salt & pepper, maybe a dash or two of red wine. Bake at 300 for at least an hour (up to 1.5 hours), the longer the better. We had them at lunch on Tuesday. They were so good we made them again for dinner!