8/12 This Week on the Farm
It has been another busy week on the farm. The majority of the time has been spent working on cleaning up the fields. Monday and Tuesday, Tyler, Brady, and Don worked on weeding the cabbage field.With the floating row covers over most of the plants adding an extra step to the weeding process, we haven’t had time to pull the covers back and weed between the plants. They managed to get several of the rows weeded and we will continue to work on the rows later this week. The next step after weeding that field is to pull off all of the covers in the field and move them so they only cover two rows of plants and not three. Since we put the covers on, the plants have grown a lot and are stretching the covers to the breaking point. By increasing the number of covers and decreasing the number of rows under each cover that should help us gain more control of that field.
Wednesday we spent the morning in Don’s garden weedwacking old plantings of oriental greens and lettuce and rototilling the areas for new plantings. This week we have planted two types of lettuce, radicchio, and Bok choi. Starting next week we will be planting lettuce weekly in order to have enough for this fall.
On Wednesday I spent the morning freeing the marigolds from weeds. I also worked on freeing the cosmos, snap dragons, celosia, and pansies. The celosia along with the last planting of corn were damaged by the 60 mph winds we had on Saturday night.
We have almost given up on our sweet corn crop this year due to the continued attacks by raccoons and the strong winds that hit on Saturday night. Given that we would not be able to fit the corn into the boxes each week in the numbers that most people would want, we are most likely not going to plant sweet corn next year. It makes more sense for us to use that land to increase yields in other crops for your boxes and for you to pick up the right number of ears of corn from a local produce stand. We feel that you will get the most out of your box if we fill it with all of the other veggies instead of just corn.
We would like to say congratulations to Drew & Kelly Carlson who are celebrating their wedding vows with family and friends this weekend. In addition we would like to thank them once again for coming out to the farm to help out with the row covers!
If you are interested in helping out with harvesting and packing one Thursday this fall please let us know! E-mail kate@burroakgardens.com