08.22.10
Posted in Production Gap, Veggies at 6:28 am by Farmer
The past couple weeks have been spent harvesting winter squash. Many of the plants just up and died due to the high humidity and rain. Our squash probably died of powdery mildew. Although we haven’t had much rain, only a few sporadic showers totaling 1/200 of an inch which is enough to increase our humidity levels creating the perfect conditions for mildews to thrive. We work extremely hard right after our last frost around mid May in an effort to get our winter squash transplanted to the field so that it has time to grow and sweeten up before the various strains of mildews migrate to our area. In years past our squash has been extremely sweet; however, we had some at lunch the other day and it wasn’t nearly as sweet as in years past. We did eat one of those that we “CULLED” out so we must try one that is “PRIME” quality for the CSA and market customers. We are almost certain that those graded as “PRIME” will have a much better flavor. The farmer hates to eat “Prime” sellable produce which is why we have “culls”, but in the case of winter squash, we will be eating some “PRIME” quality because we deserve it after all this hard work!
We are starting to roast peppers. We normally roast for the entire month of September but the fruit set of our peppers is a little earlier but not nearly as high as in years past. OOOHHH the smell of roasting peppers at market!
Carl roasting a batch of Krimzen Lee peppers. These are among our favorite roasted pepper with a little sweet and spicy flavors going on. Photo taken by Sabrina.
We are brooding new laying chicks just for ourselves. Our existing flock of layers are only giving us about a dozen eggs per week so they will become broilers in a few months once our chicks begin laying. We have done eggs for production but here on our farm we have too many predators who eat our chickens. Bobcats, coyottees, possum, raccoon, etc. We are trying to train a new guard dog but he has taken to hanging out with us rather than the animals. Our plan is this winter to build him a dog house.
Our little baby layers. These chicks are so CUTE but they won't be laying eggs for a few months. Noah mentioned that we should just buy pullets because it is cheaper and he is probably right.
THIS IS COOL….
‘Prescription Veggies’ to familes so that they are encouraged to buy fresh food at the farmers’ market.
Our Market Display after selling out of summer squash and cherry tomatoes! The lettuce has a great flavor considering all this summer heat. We need some leafy greens such as Swiss Chard which we harvested all last summer but this year it has a blight (probably from the heat). Photo taken by Sabrina.
PRODUCTION NOTE TO SELF: Plant extra melons. (We cut back our melon and winter squash planting because the size of our field was smaller than that used in last years rotation. Plant only red and yellow sweet bells out in the field. Plant 300 feet of Red Bells, 75 feet of yellow bells, 225 feet of Italians, 50 feet of Anaheim peppers, 50 feet of poblano peppers, 100 feet of krimzen peppers. Seed a later crop of swiss chard that can be transplanted the end of June because we are lacking leafy greens at market.
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06.24.10
Posted in Production Gap, Projects at 7:21 am by Farmer
Carl is back home (THANK GOODNESS) and last week he was able to connect our drip irrigation, and then after drip irrigating our crops for a few hours (these crops being peppers, basil, eggplant, winter squash and melons), it rained almost an inch that evening! In addition, he figured out why our irrigation was not watering all our runs while he was gone. I left an end cap off one of the irrigation runs so the system wasn’t building up enough pressure. We figured this out because I stayed by the tractor while he walked the lines and it was a big learning lesson for me because I just assumed we had too many lines/sprinkler heads connected to our irrigation system. We are pushing water approximately 75 feet in elevation for a distance of 600 feet in 4 inch pipe for our “mainline”. Then, connected to our mainline, we have 5 runs of 3 inch pipe for our distribution runs - all approximately 300 feet long - with approximately 7 sprinkler heads spitting out water on each run. It is simply a miracle to see the tractor/pump push that much water up into the fields.
Now it has been over a week since we last had rain and thankfully our sweet corn got the much needed precipitation for it to flourish. We are not yet sure if our corn will form tasty ears for our CSA and market customers because it is teaseling a little early. We hope and pray that in a couple weeks we can provide our CSA with sweet corn.
I am thankful that Carl is back because that allowed us to dig our garlic so it can begin curing. Most of our garlic looks pretty good this year and I think we will have plenty of good quality garlic for market sales and for the CSA! In addition we dug our first bed of red potatoes, the variety being “Red Gold”, and they are lovely and delicious.
It is unusually hot here in the mountains and being in our little singlewide trailer is probably similar to being in a sweat lodge. So last night we grilled out rather than heating our house up further with a little oven/stove action and let me tell you we had a fabulous dinner! We grilled bulb fennel, yellow squash, eggplant, zucchini, a foil package of beets and new potatoes, and Italian sausage from Spring House Meats. We marinated the fennel/squash/eggplant in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, white wine, fresh garlic, salt and pepper.
Summer just doesn’t get any better than grilling out!
Our house the "sweat lodge" during the summer. We decided to farm rather than have a nice house. Not sure why. Someday we are gong to build us a nice house.
PRODUCTION NOTE TO SELF: Need some “fluff” in our CSA Boxes for the end of June/July. Our boxes were valued a $29 this past week but they didn’t look full without greens. Ideas are fennel, more beets, swiss chard. Our swiss chard is not growing in this heat. To harvest enough for everyone we would need a “Summer Succession”. Seed beans earlier.
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09.07.09
Posted in Production Gap, Veggies, Winter Stash at 6:16 am by Farmer
Sweet Corn for Winter!
Saturday at Market Vanessa and Alex at Full Sun Farm had the most BEAUTIFUL arugula, radishes, kale and baby boc choi. The last couple years at this time we had kale and baby boc choi but the flea beetles and harlequin bugs have been so tenacious this season that our kale is stunted and our first succession of tatsoi and baby boc choi were completely devoured by the flea beetles. (We can’t even find reminiscent of these plants in the field.) Vanessa thinks perhaps we are simply building up our bug and disease population over the years. She is probably right so we just need to adjust some of our growing practices and keep on trying.
Sunday we were able to freeze 21 quarts of sweet corn so we have one quart each week during the winter! Several years ago we used to can corn but because it is such a low acid food one must pressure can it for so long that it ruined the flavor of our corn. Now we simply cut the kernels off the ear, put it in a pot with a little water, heat the corn through, then remove it from the pot and bag it in quart bags then finally place in ice water for quick cooling so that the corn retains its flavor and texture.
Production NOTE to myself: Cover our end of July direct seeded arugula and radishes. In addition, cover our first succession of kale, tatsoi and baby boc choi. We never considered covering it in summer because it is so hot; however it is just another thing to consider because it certainly works for Full Sun Farm! Consider planting our swiss chard on paper mulch to keep the weeds down. This might mean amending with fish emulsion a few times throughout the season but beats having weeds take over. (We should have reclaimed the bed a month ago.)
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08.27.07
Posted in Production Gap, Veggies at 11:40 pm by Farmer
It seems that we are at that point in the season, between summer and fall, where our production level is at an all time low for the season. We worry about having enough diversity in our CSA boxes over the next few weeks because we don’t want our CSA members to go hungry!Â
Our plan was to harvest cilantro, beets, melons and beans these next couple weeks. Some critter (probably a groundhog) ate all the melons in the field. The drought has caused our beans to be small and the beans have been severely damaged by the bean beetles. The cilantro and beets were overtaken by weeds and are also suffering from not having enough water for them to grow and flourish. We are irrigating every night but our only working pump does not have enough hp or head lift to run a multiple  irrigation lines each night, so we are rotating the areas we irrigate but none of the growing areas are getting the water they would like to flourish.Â
We are not irrigating our cut flowers and they are looking very sad with small flower heads and wilted leaves. We don’t have an extra day of the week for irrigating the flowers because after all we, nor the CSA, can eat flowers!  It is sad that we are unable to give our flowers any water but we are certainly praying for rain every night!Â
ON the bright side…. Because of the deer fence, we harvested over 1000 butternut and acorn squash for the CSA.Â
Some ideas we have tossed around for next year include trying to transplant beets for this period to prevent the overtaking of weeds and plant a later succession of greenhouse cucumbers.
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