Thank you for joining us for the 2013 growing season. Jan and I hope you enjoy your share of our harvest.
Your second vegetable share will contain green leaf lettuce, bok choy, radishes, scallions or green onions, kale, Swiss chard, arugula and potted cilantro. It’s salad season! This week’s fruit will be strawberries.
I thought I’d start my weekly letters by giving you a sense of how our crops are faring. Rain has fallen here every day for nearly three weeks, giving us an astonishing 12 to 14 inches in that time. It’s been the wettest and coolest spring here in years, conditions that are excellent for some crops, and not particularly good for others. It’s been very frustrating. As we wait for the rains to stop, the sun to come out and the water to subside shares will consist of the cool-loving crops. But don’t be discouraged, the sun will shine and temperatures will warm, and soon we’ll be delivering warm-loving crops, too.
On my Sunday evening walk around the farm I found good news: our potatoes look beautiful – they love rainfall and cool temperatures. Tomorrow we’ll give them their second hilling, and soon they’ll begin setting tubers in earnest. Our early onions, leeks, scallions and garlic, too, look lovely, although they’ll need some hand weeding this week. The roots – the red and golden beets, the newest radishes, the sweet Japanese turnips and the young carrots - are all also coming along nicely. I wish we had more coming, but the rain has reduced our access to new fields. The forecast is for clearing weather, and we should have an opportunity to pull the seeder out of the barn later this week. Our greens are also happy with these conditions, and the improving weather should give us a chance to plant more. So, cool-loving crops are content, if a little weedy.
Good news also comes from a different category of vegetables – the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and cucumbers that are growing under the protective cover of plastic. These crops look healthy and have begun to bear their fruits, even though most won’t mature for another few weeks. Weather like this makes me wish we had more greenhouses and could grow all our warm-loving vegetables inside them. Farming in the Northeast in spring involves all kinds of uncertainty, and greenhouses are a way to mitigate the risk. Now for the bad news: most of our cucumbers and eggplants, and all of our squashes, chiles and sweet potatoes are growing in the out of doors. They are warm-loving crops and have not been happy in these conditions; they’ll be late to mature, and if wet conditions persist they may become diseased.
I’ll report on our crops again soon and, in the weeks ahead, I'll use this newsletter to introduce you to our farm team, describe our organic growing practices, share farm anecdotes and more.
Best regards, Ted
- Ted Blomgren, Windflower Farm
