It’s planting season; the greenhouse is still going strong; kids touring the farm to learn about seeds; dry season starts months early this year; looking forward to weeding season.
It has been a busy two weeks since I last made an entry here. We made our first plantings of summer squash, sweet corn, winter squash, and distinctive pumpkins. We planted more lettuce, greens, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, Napa cabbage, bok choi, summer squash, herbs, and flowers. We did purchase about 300 new dahlia tubers to replace the ones we lost last year. We planted the new tubers in our relocated flower garden.
Danielle has been potting up all our tomato, eggplant, and pepper plants from the tiny starting cells.
Jaime and Enrique are preparing summer squash plants for planting with the tractor-mounted mechanical planter. We have found that the planting goes a lot more smoothly if we pop the plants out of the trays beforehand, so the operator doing the planting can concentrate on watching the machine set the plants.
Our other big push last week was to get ready for the kids’ spring farm tours this week. The kids learn about seeds and how they grow, dig through bins of assorted seed, look at little plants in the greenhouse setting, examine pea seedlings that we sprouted in seedling mix and pull out to show the roots & stem, plant bean seeds in a baggie to tape to their window at home as a mini-greenhouse, and plant pumpkin seeds in a flat for us to plant out later in the pumpkin patch visited by fall farm tours. We give the group a cherry tomato plant to grow up so they can harvest and eat the tomatoes and also see the seeds they produce. They dig around in the worm bin to find adult and baby worms and worm eggs. They also meet our baby chicks and learn a bit about various breeds of chickens. They visit our ducks and pygmy goats, and meet one goat up close. They walk through the raspberries and observe the bees visiting the flowers. They visit the apple orchard to see the tiny apples and climb on a small straw-bale pyramid – usually the spot for the group photos.
After all our earlier fussing about the wet spring and getting a late start, the weather has changed to dry. April was very dry and May is holding the pattern, although it looks like we’ll get a few sprinkles this weekend. Last night we received 0.05 inches – enough to dampen the soil surface. Today have been very windy – 10+ mph all day long – so the moisture has been stripped away. The surface soil is getting powdery dry already, although there is moisture still a few inches down. Dry as it is, I’ve been seeing some slug damage on the transplants out in the fields.
Peas are up and are taking off growing nicely now. The dry weather has held the weeds back some, but they are showing up now. We did weed out the peas a few days ago. We will start weeding in earnest next week.
Next week we’ll start planting out gourds, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, & pole beans, as well as more greens, flowers, & herbs.
Today’s CD: Adiemus – Adiemus III: Dances of Time