By Farmers Richard & Andrea
It’s been nearly six weeks since our early June farm update
and a lot has happened! The cold, wet
start to our season quickly shifted to hot and humid. The heat is great for some of our warm
weather crops like peppers, melons, zucchini and cucumbers, but heat with high
humidity can wreak havoc on other crops such as cilantro, baby bok choi,
arugula, etc making them susceptible to leaf disease. The weeds are also loving these hot days and
sadly, they are growing quite nicely.
Our determined crew continues to do battle against weeds, hitting them
from every angle possible in an attempt to save crops. Despite these farming challenges, we have
some really nice crops in the fields and a lot of exciting food coming your way
very soon!
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| Italian garlic, bunched and ready to bring in |
Starting at the end of last week, our focus shifted to
garlic harvest. As we write this article
on Tuesday, July 16, we only have about one third of the crop remaining to
harvest….and it is a very nice crop.
This is probably the nicest crop of garlic we’ve seen in the past 10-12
years. The past two years were pretty
disappointing, so before we planted garlic last year we paused for a little
field crew huddle and pep talk for ourselves.
Two poor crops, lets not add a third to that list. So we made sure soil conditions were right,
carefully planted the cloves at the right depth and then carefully covered the
field with a nice layer of chopped straw mulch before the snow started to
fall. We were careful to give it enough
of a mulch layer to insulate it, but not too much that would prevent the garlic
from pushing through. We also covered
the field with row cover which also helped keep the straw mulch in place over
the winter. While many of you may still
be cursing the harsh, cold, snowy winter we had last year, the conditions may
have actually been somewhat favorable for this year’s garlic crop! The garlic was tucked safely underground,
covered by a thick layer of insulating snow which protected it from the polar
vortex! The result was a very high
survival rate this spring. By July 17 or
18 we plan to have the entire garlic crop tucked away safely in the greenhouse
to dry and cure over the next few weeks.
Then the hard work of trimming, cleaning and selecting seed for next
year’s crop will begin!
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| A pepper plant loaded with baby bell peppers |
Based on the amount of zucchini in your boxes the past few
weeks, you may have noticed that our zucchini is producing very nicely right
now! Zucchini is one of those crops that
loves heat and production can skyrocket during a hot week. Actually, we’re harvesting from both our
first and second crops now. Not quite
the timing we had hoped for, but there isn’t any way to hold back the second
planting so we’re just going for it!
Yesterday the crew picked 1,400# of zucchini! We pick three times each week, so there’s the
potential that we’ll pick over 4,000# of zucchini this week alone! We’re only picking from our first cucumber
crop right now, but it won’t be long before the second planting kicks in. We’re just glad cucumbers and zucchini aren’t
peaking at the same time!
Pretty soon we’ll have peppers and tomatoes to enjoy with
all that zucchini. The pepper field
looks quite nice this year and the plants are full of blossoms as well as
small, immature peppers. It looks like
we will be picking bell peppers and possibly jalapeño peppers as early as next
week. The tomatoes also have fruit set on. While we haven’t seen any fruit
turning color yet, this hot week ahead of us could accelerate the ripening. We may be picking tomatoes for next week’s
boxes as well!
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| Sweet corn growing in the field. |
If you were to walk through the melon and watermelon fields,
you would find the cutest little melons set on the plants. It’s exciting to think that in just a few
weeks we’ll be slurping juicy slices of sweet melon! What’s summer without sweet melons,
watermelon and sweet corn?! While our
first two plantings of sweet corn are not quite what we had hoped for, we will
have sweet corn coming soon. We actually
have five plantings of corn and the last three look really good right now! Of course if we’re going to talk about corn
we have to mention beans and edamame as well.
Our first two plantings of beans are usually the most challenging to
grow, but both are looking pretty good with more plantings coming up behind
them. It looks like it’s going to be a
pretty good year for green beans, and we hope our purple amethyst beans will
produce well again this year! The first
crop of edamame has little fuzzy pods hanging from the vines. Just a few more weeks and we’ll be popping
the sweet, tender, bright green soybeans into our mouths!
Don’t think we can breathe a sigh of relief and go on
vacation after garlic harvest is done.
Well, we can breathe a sigh of relief but then we need to get ready to
harvest onions! It must be an allium
favorable year because the onions are also looking pretty nice! If we can keep the tops alive for a few more
weeks we should have a pretty sizeable onion harvest which will leave us with
just one problem….where are we going to store everything! It’s a good problem and one we’re happy to
have.
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| Sprinklers running after irrigation crew laid pipe. |
The irrigation crew has shifted their focus from just
fertigation (providing nutrients via drip irrigation lines with minimal water)
to now needing to deliver more water as well.
Over the past week fields have really dried out, going from a state of
excess moisture to now needing to be watered.
On Monday the crew set up irrigation pipe for sprinklers to water some
crops planted last week including carrots, cilantro and radishes. They need water to soften the soil and make
sure the seed has adequate moisture to germinate and break through the
surface. You just never know when the
weather will shift to a drought, so we’re working hard to stay ahead of the
game.
We’ve also hosted some visitors to the farm over the past 6
weeks. On June 16 we had a great turnout
for our annual Strawberry Day party. We
had a nice, pleasant day filled with good food, strawberry ice cream, laughs,
questions and just a lot of fun. Thank
you to everyone who joined us in celebrating this year’s strawberry crop. At the end of June we also had the pleasure
of hosting Wisconsin’s Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes. We had a pleasant visit with Lt. Governor
Barnes including some great, honest conversation about a variety of topics
including the importance of pollinator habitat, climate change and the impact
erratic weather is having on Wisconsin farms and communities.
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| Farmer Richard and Lt. Governor Barnes sampling fresh strawberries. |
We are also happy to have added a few more friendly faces to
our crew. Amy started the first week of
June, coming to us from Colorado with a positive attitude and a willingness to
learn…..everything! Amy is our Packing
Shed Support person who helps us stay organized in the packing shed by managing
cooler and supply inventories as well as helping out wherever she’s needed from
day to day. She has also helped out in
the greenhouses, is learning all there is to know about managing our seed
inventory and in general is starting to put together the pieces of “the big
picture” about what it takes to bring everything together to get vegetables to
your tables! We are also happy to
welcome back Samuel and Silvestre. They weren’t able to join us earlier in the
season, but made it back to the farm this past weekend and are hard at
work!
In the midst of all the hustle associated with summer and a
busy growing season, we took time to relax a bit last Saturday, July 13 as we
hosted our Annual Crew Appreciation Party.
We ended our work day at about 2:30 pm, got cleaned up and then met up
at the Legion Park near our farm. Nearly
all our crew members were able to make it as well as some family members
including daughters, sons, wives and husbands who live in the area. We had a fun evening filled with goofy soccer
and volleyball games, some card games, water balloons, music, a piñata and a
delicious meal. Angel and Ascencion
roasted a goat in our underground brick oven so we had goat carnitas along with
grilled HVF hotdogs. We finished up the
meal with our favorite Castle Rock ice cream and special cookies from Bloom
Bake Shop. Annemarie and her crew at
Bloom made the cutest vegetable and farm animal cookies for us including
cookies resembling broccoli, potatoes, carrots, sweet corn, peas, goats, pigs,
cows, etc. We had a really fun evening
and this party always reminds us (Richard and Andrea) how blessed we are to be
able to work with such a great group of people who are happy, hardworking,
funny, sincere, creative, caring, talented individuals.
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| Cookies from Bloom Bake Shop |
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| HVF crew playing volleyball at the Crew Appreciation Party. |
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