This Week on the Farm 6/4
Well it is a little over a week away before our first CSA boxes go out and we sure have been busy. We have had a lot of help from our high school workers this last week, not to mention my father and other friends stopping by to help, and the fields look much cleaner than last year. It has helped having more help earlier in the season.
We are the featured farm this week on the Eat Local series. Check out this link to see us talk about kale! If you leave a comment on Heartland Credit Union’s facebook page, you are entered into a drawing to win a $20 gift card to Monty’s Blue Plate Diner in Madison. We are pretty pumped at how well it turned out, especially since we wanted them to feature our delicious strawberries, not kale. However, Matt’s recipe for a fresh kale salad looks darn tasty. I can’t wait to try it later this summer!
All of the first planting of loose leaf lettuce has been weeded and it seemed to pop overnight as soon as we freed it from the weeds. We also have weeded half of our first planting of carrots. Some of you may remember that we lost the battle against the weeds in the carrots last year, so this year we planted them in wider blocks. This allows us to go between the rows with our bike tire cultivator and not have to spend as much time hand weeding. I say “as much” because it is still an extraordinary amount of time weeding per plant. But they are delicious, so we try to take the time to weed them.
We were all set to start transplanting our peppers, tomatillos, and eggplant last Friday when our bigger tractor pooped out on us. Of course the place that has parts for old Ford tractors was closed until Monday, so we had to wait until today to try to fix the tractor. The main replacements were a new coil and a new distributer cap. I am not too savvy when it comes to engine mechanics, but, from what I understand, by fixing these parts the tractor is now able to carry the spark through to engine so that the pistons can do their thing and thus the engine works. Like I said, I’m not the mechanic in the family. Anyway, it works. Tomorrow we can finish getting all of our transplants in the ground.
The peas and beans look fantastic as do the onions, leeks, and scallions. Also, all of our direct seeded stuff in Field 10 is finally starting to take off. Field 10 is very sandy and a week and a half ago we had 40 mph winds. Since we hadn’t had rain in three weeks, the sand blew everywhere and covered over half of the field. Almost all of the plants we had planted were covered by the blow sand. We were really upset the next morning when we went out to inspect the damage, but plants tend to be stronger than we sometimes give them credit for and they pushed through the sand. They will be a little behind schedule, but we are thrilled to have more plants than we thought we were going to have.
Keep your eyes posted next Monday or Tuesday for the “Your Share This Week” update on the front page. We will try to let you know ahead of time what will be in your box each week so you can plan your menus, and possibly start to drool. Remember the boxes tend to be smaller for the first couple of weeks as things are starting to take off. We do live in Wisconsin, so we can’t have watermelon in the first box!