Tomatoes in June?

As many of you know, our 30′ x 76′ greenhouse was put up at the end of 2017. We were very fortunate to get a grant for two greenhouses last year.  The second one, will be going up in the spring/early summer.

We will have spring veggies in this greenhouse that will be ready in the spring (April/May).  Yum!  Can’t wait!  Also in this greenhouse, we will be growing, tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, basil and green peppers.  So….what does this mean?  It means, that we should have these crops ready one month earlier than they are typically ready in this area.

I know, I hear you saying, yeah but greenhouse tomatoes – they don’t taste like anything!  Ours, will have taste and they will actually taste like a tomato because of the way that we grow.  So look for us at the markets this summer with crops a bit earlier than the other folks.  Oh yeah, if you want to make sure you get some and don’t miss out if you come late to the market, think about signing up for our free choice CSA (you pick what you want) and your bag will be already set aside with the products that you want that week so you won’t miss out!  If you sign up by February 1st, you get an extra 10% in purchasing power.  Check it out here.  If you want to learn how to get a free CSA, check it out here.

Strawberry Plants

We just finished planting 2,000 strawberry plants. These are full size plants so by planting them in the fall they can get established and you get a full harvest in June. Conventional methods have you planting in the spring, waiting a year and then getting the bounty. We can’t wait to offer nutrient dense, chemical free strawberries to our customers next year.

Rock Dust

We have 32 tons of rock dust being delivered tomorrow. This is one of the key ingredients to growing the way we do. We will be selling this to anyone who is interested in using this on their gardens. We still have to figure out pricing.

Clean up Day

Today we weeded out all of the raspberry plants and bush hogged around the raspberry garden. Next we removed all the straw from the garlic and placed it around the raspberry plants. We also removed all of the garlic scapes. It won’t be long now, less than 30 days and we will have garlic. We also mowed in between the blueberry plants and low and behold, some blueberries were ready. Everything is looking neat and tidy now around the farm.

Raspberry field

Garlic waiting to be harvested at the end of the month

Blueberries and Black Raspberries.

Bed Preparation

We thought we should post about what it takes to prepare a bed before we plant into it. For those of you who follow us, you know we feed our soil with nutrients that are severely lacking in many soils these days. Coincidentally, these same nutrients are also lacking in our bodies as well. By feeding the soil, the plants uptake these nutrients and when we consume these plants, we are getting all of the benefits that we put into the soil. It’s pretty neat. First up is a bucket of “black gold” our own compost. We spread this by hand with a shovel. One of us is in the tractor while the other shovels it out while the tractor slowly backs up. Next, we have a picture of the tractor (last Sunday before the rains came) and in the bucket of the tractor are several containers. Within each container is a different mineral. We have lime, gypsum, colodial phosphate, stonedust, sulfate of potash, menafee humates, boron and probooster. There is one more that looks like coal, but the name escapes me right now. All of these get sprinkled (in certain amounts) on each bed by hand (our future hope is to get some kind of mechanical spreader). After all of this is done, we rototil the top layer and if applicable we put down the plastic and irrigation tape. Throughout the summer, we will feed the soil with fish emulsion, calcium or phosphorus. As you can see it is quite the process to prepare a bed. We enjoy this work and really want to provide our customers with good, nutritious, tasty food the way it use to taste many, many years ago.

Green bean seeds anyone?

Ok just got box 1 of my seed order today from Johnny’s. I lifted it up saying to myself boy is this heavy. I opened it up expecting to see all of my seeds but it only contained one package of seeds, 25,000 seeds of Provider green beans. Meant to order 5,000. Anyone want any at our cost? Let us know.

The Frost Has Hit

We definitely got a frost last night. Let’s hope the sea of row covers did their jobs

Ready for the Frost

We are ready for the frost. This is what we got covered before we left for the market and we just finished covering the rest with tractor lights on.

Garlic Planting

This weekend is our garlic planting weekend. We always try and plant around Columbus Day weekend. This year we saved all of our nice big bulbs that we grew this summer (and there were some really nice ones!) for seeds. For those of you who don’t know, you take apart the bulbs and each clove is your seed. The bigger clove, the better. Today I planted 302 of the Georgian Fire. I also took them all apart this morning. I just finished taken apart the German Extra Hardy ones and they total 676, plus I added more of the Georgian Fire so this year’s total garlic seeds to be planted will be 1,032!!! Yeah – our first year over 1,000. I hope to finish planting these tomorrow and then one more thing off the list. Take a look at these pictures. Some of these cloves are huge – look at them compared to the quarter in the picture.

The box to the left (below) are seed garlic bulbs. The box to the right are the bulbs broken down to cloves. 1,032 seed garlic this year. Looking forward to next year’s garlic harvest!

Our Table of Greens Coming Along Nicely…