Sunday, June 14, 2009

2009 Season, Week Four

June 13, 2009

This week's harvest:

carrots
beets (eat the greens, too!)
swiss chard
shelling peas
anise hyssop &/or lemon balm

This week's news:

We started out the week by working on setting up the deer fence around the new acre garden. The task is almost complete aside from getting it hooked up to the solar electric charger & baiting it with apples & peanut butter to give the curious deer a little shock in the nose & keep them from venturing into the garden. Next we cultivated nearly all of the young crops in the garden -- and there's a lot right now! The plants always seem so happy & the gardens look so good after cultivation! We did a little more planting this week, too. We set out about 100 more late season tomato plants & about 150 eggplant. We also transplanted some melons & cucumbers. We direct seeded peanuts & a bed of parsnips, & we started our fall leeks in soil blocks. We have so much growing in the gardens right now but this week's harvest doesn't really reflect that unfortunately! There's just not a lot of diversity. Plan as we might, that's just the way timing sometimes works out! The summer crops are on their way & next week you should see the beginnings of squash & zucchini, some more beautiful lettuce, & maybe even some basil.

We had a few smaller rains early in the week & a big windy thunderstorm on Thursday morning & again on Thursday evening. The consistent moisture has been great for keeping our gardens growing, that's for sure! Thanks for going on this seasonal roller-coaster ride with us!!

2009 Season, Week Three

June 6, 2009 newsletter

This week's harvest:

shelling peas
lettuce -- "Deer Tongue," "Little Gem," &/or "Tom Thumb"
carrots
beet greens w/occasional beet
garlic "pigtails"
orach -- "Mountain Spinach"
oregano

This week's news:

It was another full week on the farm. We started off the week acclimating the baby turkeys to life on our farm... Life on the grass instead of in a brooder in a barn. We had a few die in the first couple of days but the rest seem to have adjusted & now they all seem happy & cheeping!

In the garden we transplanted tomatillos & the remainder of our sweet & hot peppers. We also planted a bunh of sweet potato slips (plants) which totaled over 2000 row feet of garden space. It was a scorching hot day, as it always seems to be when we're planting sweet potatoes, followed by another hot day before we got some rain on Wednesday... So we're probably going to need to replace some plants next week! And since a mouse was fixated on removing every single watermelon seed from our soil blocks in the green house (twice!) we wound up direct-seeding our watermelons into the garden & they are coming up nicely now! All this planting has quickly filled up the entire acre of our "new garden" so now we really need to put up a fence before the deer get a taste of all the goodies we've got planted. (Cart before horse?) We also welcomed three baby pigs to the farm scene this week! Needless to say our days have been full!