Dear Farm friends,
Have you ever worked a week that started at 80 degrees, and ended at 32? We have. It’s been another big one, and we hope you have weathered it well.
At the market:
Market morning is dawning quite clear and pleasant, no snow falling at all! We’ll be there soon, with lots of goodies for you. IT’s still a bit chilly for the tomato starts, though, and with a few more quite cold nights in the forecast, we think you should hold off planting them into your gardens anyways. The good news is, we do have quite a few tomato starts left over to sell, now that we have all of our own planted into our caterpillar tunnel. On Tuesday during the hosted farmstore hours, we’ll have all of our extra plants out for sale, so come then to shop for your garden. (3:00-6:00 pm, one of us will be available to help you choose varieties, answer questions, etc..)
There will be plenty of cool-loving veggies at market! We harvested some greens a little early in case that 2” of snow really did materialize, but we are so glad it didn’t. We’ll have spinach, salad mix, spicy mix, baby kale, arugula, boc choi, baby boc choi, radishes, a few salad turnips, kale and collard bunches, plus mint, chives, cilantro, and dill leaf to flavor your tables. And plenty of eggs, too!
From the farm: A theme of the farm this week for me has been hoping that some of the challenges, even the mistakes, help us improve, help us draw in the resources for longer term success.
For example: we planted our winter squash last Sunday, but had been dragging our feet a bit about covering them with row cover (which requires placing hundreds of wire hoops over the plants, and carrying lots of sandbags to hold the frost cloth down in the wind). The frosty nights and snow forecasts were stressful, but they did force us to get several blocks of field plantings covered, which will now help them stay warm and cozy and boost their growth over the next several weeks.
Out front, if you have come to the farsmtore, you may have noticed a row of brilliant yellow flowers, near the peas. Full disclosure: those were intended to be nice little tatsoi and mizuna bunches for you early season stir-fries. Something about their conditions in the caterpillar tunnel, and some early problems in the nursery, however, caused them to form very little leaf before “bolting” and sending up flowering stalks. Kind of a failure, and yet now they are buzzing with life. We’ve been watching them, on the sunny days, packed with bees—not just honeybees, but also a plethora of solitary native bees that do so much work of pollination through the season.
With little else blooming, we decided to let that bed go, to feed our insect friends. It’s a bit dicey, as it is also full of another farm problem: aphids. With more winter growing, we fear we are helping some of our pests over-winter as well, and have had a few early spring outbreaks of those little monsters. If you happened by on Monday evening, it might have looked as if we were wandering slowly and relaxed through that bed, giving the flowers a little loving caress and close observation every few plants. It would not be totally untrue; we were scanning closely, noting the concentration of ladybugs there, the diversity of bees. The loving caress was actually a motion of smashing clumps of aphids on the flowering stalks, a somewhat gross pass-time. But you see, in the ecology of the farm, we’re hoping that we are doing a tiny equivalent of feeding the bears…..or the ladybugs, lacewings, and other predators, in this case. It’s a delicate balance; we want to leave enough of these pests to be an early feast for the beneficial insects, without creating a source population for a farm-wide aphid explosion. Ideally, this little mistake will help boost our number of beneficial insects on the farm, which will fan out as plantings grow, to protect our peppers, eggplant, etc.. If we were a slick farm documentary this would be guaranteed to work, complete with triumphant soundtrack and time-lapse photography. As an actual, real farm, we’ll just have to see how it plays out…stay tuned.
Similarly, as we continue to recruit for our remaining full-time and part time farm help positions, we are thinking a lot about our systems, our team dynamics and management and tools, always with the hope that we can keep getting better each season, each week. Again, we’ll see….and if you know anyone willing to join in on that journey, we are still hiring!
We hope to see you at market, or at the farmstore—remember, leftover plant sale on Tuesday afternoon, but the self-serve farmstore is open all the time!
With frosty green gratitude,
Mary and Noah, SweetRoot Farm