Drying Out

Observing (and taste-testing) the outdoor sugar snap and snow peas during our Sunday field walk. Outdoor snap and snow peas should be ready/mature later this week (#4) and definitely by week #5. A few successions of green snap beans are in the foreground.

Ample rain, high temperatures, a good amount of sunshine. It's the season for growth and the time to maturity of crops to speed up (lettuce can mature twice as fast in June-August as March-May). Somehow we're already into the 2nd week of June and harvest week #4. Time has sped up as well; at least it feels that way, since there's hardly a restful or reflective minute during this part of the growing season to slow it down. That said, I believe we're about to embark on a transitional phase as the bulk of our spring and summer crop planting is behind us. We're entering a few weeks of summer succession plantings of crops like beans, edamame, herbs, and lettuces before we descend into the fall crop planting timeframe. During this time there aren't any huge plantings of long-season crops. Roughly 2/3 of the farm is already under crop production so we're also firmly in crop maintenance mode. There's less open field space to chisel plow, make raised beds in, and plant into. We don't begin incorporating crop residue, spreading compost, or the sowing of cover crops until mid-July. I still need to finalize the last few pieces of our annual crop rotation puzzle to determine which fields will be the home to which late summer and fall crops, based on a 3-5 year plant family cycle that also factors in time of planting. Probably some portion of the still unused land will be fallow this year.

We filled a lot of field space with crops this past week. Three thousand sweet potato slips were planted in wet/muddy/slippery conditions this past Friday. Earlier in the week we planted 5,500 leeks, 800 lettuces, 450 cantaloupe, a few thousand beans as well as edamame, and hundreds of basil plants. New on our agenda for this coming week will be tomato pruning and trellising.

We were lucky during the multiple rounds of crazy weather this past week and we hope you were too. This coming week looks to be a bit more mild with lower humidity; perfect for strawberry picking. See you at the farm!