Veggies

Last of the spring planting

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It’s another week till the start of CSA shares and the first picking of peas, and at least 3 weeks until some of the heavier crops—broccoli, cauliflower, summer squash—are ready, so Friday’s are still about general fieldwork, not HARVEST. Just ahead of the end of spring, Lynn, Libby and Jordan planted out a last wave of winter squash and some fast-maturing (80-90) Neon pumpkins. That brings the spring planting to a close, a little later than usual, overall, but considering the first-year, start-up situation, really good!

We also put in one bed of melons under infrared-transmitting (IRT) plastic mulch (above).  For a couple of years, I planted 5-10 50′ beds under IRT mulch (more heat to the soil), but yield wasn’t worth the effort, including the extra watering (didn’t use drip tape under the plastic). This year, with one bed to focus on, it’s an experiment—we’ll try to give them extra special care!

Lynn vanished early from lunch, only to be found reading her new herb book under a tree. This photo (below) doesn’t nearly capture the scene: it looked like an impossibly peaceful countryscape, from a simple, carefree world—fit for a postcard. We were laughing, and Jordan spontaneously got out his camera and took photos, too.  I asked her if she’d scouted the location for the setting (joking, but I can also be a bit of a cynic! :), she said it was just the best spot she could find for shade!

Beet greens!

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First beet greens

If you love beet greens, you can practically taste this photo! Fresh-picked, sauteed just to wilting in olive oil and butter, with a smashed and chopped clove or two of garlic, salt and freshly ground black pepper. Heaped on a plate. Topped with a couple of poached farm eggs. It’s hard to imagine anything easier to cook and more perfect to eat.

The greens from the first planting of beets—Kestrel (above) and candy-striped Chioggia—are just sizing up. They can be harvested at any size, from quite tiny for eating raw in salads, to huge, for cooking. I’ve never grown beets just for the greens, they come from thinning the plants, which usually happens when the leaves are 4-6″ (10-15cm).

On Friday, we’ll thin the beets for Saturday’s market. For the beet greens with poached egg, our new 20-week-old hens arrive on Monday, ready to lay. Life makes sense. :)

Hand-tended

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Hand-tending pumpkin transplant

“Hand-tended” is one of the phrases that usually gets popped into the occasional bit of promotional writing about this market garden. Sounds good! If asked (hasn’t happened so far), I’d explain that we don’t use many machines, most of the garden work is done with hand tools, or just hands, as in, hand-weeding, or plucking off bugs…by hand. And lots of time is spent through the season, crouching and crawling around, checking out what’s going on with particular plantings of this or that. Which all seems pretty cool. :)

Today, Tara and I hand-transplanted two beds of early-maturing Neon pumpkins (above), along with a few more Snack Jack (tiny pumpkins bred for producing lots of tasty seed). The Neons are 70-80-day hybrid, kinda freakishly quick to mature (pumpkins are mostly 100+ days).

At this point in the season here, it’s getting kinda late for winter squash and pumpkins, but there are a few beds still to fill in, so a bunch of 70-85-day varieties, coming up in pots in the greenhouse, will be heading out to the field over the next week. With anything but the worst in cold and cloudy weather over the next three months, they should size up just fine!

First veg at the new farmers’ market!

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At last! Our first day at the new farmers’ market, with a large sign (we temporarily used our new roadside sign to make a…big entrance :), and a small but superfresh and tasty (and seasonal) selection: all-lettuce mesclun, spinach (Spargo) and radish (Rebel). Lynn was happy to be at market in her home town, and Tara made her new-tiny-farmer market debut! The flow of people was steady, and we sold out by 11 am. Pretty good!

Pricing at this market is quite a bit different from the old market: everything is more expensive! It’s not quite at urban market levels, but a lot closer in this bigger town. Basically, the same harvest as in previous seasons sells for almost twice as much.

This is for sure more realistic and fair. I think about the ridiculously low (though rapidly  rising) cheap food supermarket pricing that sets the baseline for what small growers can charge at the market. I recall that in North America and Europe, we apparently spend less than 10% of income on food, when quality produce just can’t come that cheap. And these aren’t ridiculous, high-end, boutique veggie prices, simply a more realistic price—processed foods are still sooo much more expensive, while possibly (probably) killing you at the same time…

STILL, it kinda feels weird putting less into a bag than I’ve been used to for six market seasons. Oh, well, change is always a little strange, this one is good all around, and I’ll get used to it! :)

Another hand-watering method

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Hand-watering onions

Another fine temporary measure this spring (and another of the many things the trusty Kubota compact tractor can do) is our new spot-watering method. Michelle waters in a last, experimentally late tray of onions with a slightly modified, inexpensive ($5) plastic watering can that holds about 2 gallons (8 l), and has big holes for fast, high-volume output. These cans we usually plunge into a rain barrel (or snow barrel) for filling, and to speed that up, I cut a squarish opening in the top (I always forget to cut the opening to the back, so water doesn’t escape from the top when pouring when full). The trick here is that the water comes from the Kubota’s bucket, maybe 30-40 gallons (110-150 l) of it, depending on how carefully the drive.  You fill up, then head over to exactly where you want, like a movable rain barrel! The whole thing is quick and  easy, good for watering in new seedings and transplants, until I hook up the field-long irrigation pipe. Quite the luxury, in a way, but the tractor’s already there, and we gotta keep things moving along! :)

More onions

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Red Wing onion seedlings

A last tray of onions—Red Wing hybrid red onions that did well last year—is hanging around the seedling room. What are they doing still not in the ground? Well, most of our onions—Stuttgarter-type yellow cooking, yellow Spanish, Red Wing, around 3,o00 in all—are already planted, in two sections, far apart. As I jigsawed together this season’s garden layout (now with the garden MAP), these guys just didn’t fit in the first two onion plots. So, they’ll get a bed of their own, somewhere, real soon, and we’ll see how they do compared to the others. Timing!

Filling the fields continues

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Transplanting parsley

More slow but steady planting out. Flat-leaf and curly parsley, started so long ago, finally hit the field by the hands of Libby and Lynn. Later in the afternoon, we started one section of potatoes. The timing this spring is…unusual. We’re still tilling and retilling sections to further break up sod, planting the same crop in two or three different spots, and staggering planting dates by waiting as long as possible, to get as much variation in conditions as we can. It’s hedging bets in a new market garden…


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