This Week on the Farm 6/2
Well, as many of you know, because the of the weather this spring, we have decided to push our first delivery back one week. We felt that we just couldn’t provide enough vegetables for the boxes by June 8, so the first drop-offs will be June 15 for Madison and Rio, and June 16 for Appleton and JJ Keller employees. We will extend the season one week later so that you will still receive your full 20 weeks of vegetable deliveries. We hope to have lots of great tasting veggies for you starting the 15th all the way through October! We do still have shares available so if you have been procrastinating on buying a share, you got lucky that the weather has given you another week to get your form in!
On to what has been going on here since our last post. We worked on clearing our electric fence around fields 1-6 and raised the lowest wire by a notch. Hopefully this will solve the problem we had last year of the fence grounding out, while still keeping the critters away from our tasty produce. This evening we saw a deer come out of our new fields, so the fencing project for that field just got bumped up a bit on the “to-do” list.
The potatoes are finally popping out, it seems like they took forever to come up, but the ground probably just wasn’t warm enough. They are looking good, but some already have holes eaten in the leaves from flea beetles. We will get some yellow sticky traps out there tomorrow to control those little devils. The onions and leeks in that field look good, they are a nice dark green and look strong. We have just set up irrigation in that field as well, so the onions have it made.
The transplanted crops look good as well, some of the cabbage-family crops have a little bit of insect damage, but the row-covers that finally came should solve that issue. They are 19 feet wide and we plan on holding them down with sand bags. The first planting of sweet corn just popped out of the ground today. Our first planting of celery was transplanted into the ground this week also, celery likes its feet wet, so it has a designated soaker hose that we hook up every other day to make sure that it doesn’t dry out too much. The celery that we transplanted was a good 10-12 inches tall, so when you put those into a bare field… talk about instant gratification!
Of the direct seeded crops, most are up and alive. The turnips have been thinned and the radishes are up as well. The carrots on the other hand had fairly poor germination, so we think we will have to replant them. We think that because they were the first thing we planted with our new 6-row seeder, we may have planted them too deep. But now that we have a feel for how the seeder works, we should have better luck the second time around.
Hopefully this upcoming week should see all the squash and summer squash transplanted into the ground, as well as the cucumbers, pumpkins and peppers. Also with the end of school we will have a few more hands to help out here next week which will definitely speed things up!
Hope your gardens are growing great!