Happy Friday! We're almost there: the longest day of the year is coming right up on June 21. After the 21st, we will have wrapped up most of our planting and can focus on cultivating and harvesting here at Great Oak Farm. The only big planting we have left is our winter storage carrots and beets, which we plant just after the 21st, probably on Thursday next week. Funny to start thinking about winter storage crops when we've hardly gotten started with summer, isn't it?
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Our hoophouse crops of cucumbers and tomatoes are growing gangbusters with all of this heat. We've been irrigating them every other day, and harvesting cukes every other day as well to keep cuke sizes reasonable and not too seedy. The cherry tomatoes are just starting to ripen, and the slicer tomatoes should begin to start turning red in about 2 more weeks. They take a bit longer than those cherry tomatoes, but I can hardly wait! One of my favorite summertime dishes is cucumber-tomato-basil salad with fresh mozz and olive oil/balsamic dressing... So far we've got tons of cukes, the hoophouse basil is just getting ready for harvest this week, and we picked the first 4 cherry tomatoes last week. It's gonna taste like summer real soon.
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Out in the fields, our transplants are finally large enough to cultivate with our finger weeders. These yellow rubber fingers reach into the row of the crop and scrub out the weeds that are growing in the row. To help clean out weeds that are growing close to the plants, there are two sets of sweeps that scrape along shallowly and uproot weeds along side the rows of the crop. The picture above is of the fingers running through the winter squash field.
As you can imagine, it's all about timing for these cultivators to work. If the crop is too small or the weeds are too big, it isn't very effective. We usually reserve a different cultivating tractor (a 1947 Allis Chalmers G) for this task, but for the last week I have been troubleshooting the starter to no avail. So, the starter went in to Superior for a rebuild, and I farmer-engineered the finger weeder to fit beneath our Farmall Cub cultivating tractor (which is running like a champ!) It took about 2 hours of reconfiguring the cultivator assembly, as it was made specifically to fit on the other tractor, but thankfully persistence prevailed. I got it figured out, and it's doing a great job on the weeds out there. Farmer Sean and Alex got a chance to run it through some one week old green beans. Here's a link to a video of the finger weeder running through those beans if you'd like to watch it work:
https://www.facebook.com/GreatOakFarm/videos/784088035610513
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Something new to keep an eye out in your boxes for this week is garlic scapes. They can be used much the same way as green garlic, but my favorite way to use them is to coat them in olive oil, salt, and pepper and grill them. Think asparagus meets garlic, in a good way!
Otherwise, I hope you are enjoying salad season to the fullest. It won't be long until we're harvesting more fruits and fewer leafy greens, so enjoy them while you can.
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Have a great weekend, and here's to some RAIN (hopefully?) this Sunday - the crops could sure use a drink.
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
