Wow, it sure feels like we've turned a corner into the nicer, more summer-y part of spring! Thank goodness for that - a little warmth and sunshine goes a looong way towards drying out our fields and putting some meaningful growth on our hoophouse crops.
After writing up this newsletter, I am going to change the fluids on the field tractor and (fingers crossed!) FINALLY get some field work done this spring. We're about 3 weeks behind on our field work schedule, so we turned down the thermostat in the greenhouse to slow down the transplants a bit. That way they will grow more slowly, giving us time to get fields prepped for planting in the coming days. The greenhouse is packed as usual, but we need to make some room for lots more starts next week. More broccoli (always broccoli!) and racks and racks of winter squash starts as well..JPG)
We will begin hardening off process for our onions and early broccoli starts now that the nighttime temps are above freezing, and hopefully we'll be able to transplant them out at the end of next week. To do this, we move the flats of transplants right outside the greenhouse, where they are protected from the wind by the structure on one side, but still get watered regularly. Hardening off is like taking "baby steps" to help plants acclimate from the warm, protected greenhouse to the more variable, windy conditions they will experience in the field.
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You can see in the greenhouse we have some tomato transplants that didn't make it out to the field. These tomatoes were browsed by voles in while growing in the greenhouse - something I have never seen before. Tomato leaves are in the nightshade family and contain toxins, but it seems that the voles were so hungry with the late spring that they were willing to give practically anything a try to find fresh food! We're holding them over (on top of racks protected from hungry voles) in the greenhouse to try nursing them back to health.
Tomatoes are resilient growers, and if the plants produce a new "leader" or sucker from a leaf node, they will be a little behind but will still provide lots of fruit this summer. These tomato plants will likely be ready for transplant in about 2 weeks out there in our hoophouses..JPG)
Meanwhile, this week was a busy one finishing up our tomato and sugar snap pea transplanting. That's them, in the rows with the metal T-posts which we'll use for trellising them in a week or two. We have a few bags of spinach this week for your CSA boxes as well, harvested from a bed that we just transplanted peas into, but that's officially IT for Great Oak spinach this spring. It was a good run this spring - we had several weeks with harvests of well over 100 POUNDS of spinach!
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This year, we're going big on those sugar snaps in our hoophouses for early production, with a whopping 4 beds of peas! Our first pea planting survived without any rodent damage (after some extensive trapping to ensure success - those critters must be looking forward to warm summer weather as much as we are), so we went ahead and put the rest of the peas out this week. Peas don't mind the cool nights, but I am sure they appreciated the extra 5-8 degrees of warmth that our hoophouses provided them those cold nights this week.
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The tomatoes on the other hand would not have survived the cold nights this week without a little extra protection, so we made sure to tuck them in nice and cozy under 2-3 layers of row cover every evening. The row cover is handy stuff, but is time consuming to put out and take back off every day. .JPG)
Like everything, using row cover is a balance. It can protect plants from colder temps, however if left in place for very long it can encourage rodents to move in and damage plants. We try to be as careful as we can when pulling the fabric over the plants, and use hoops to keep the fabric off of the tender transplants, but sometimes despite our best intentions we can break off plants when we move the cover around. It's not a silver bullet, but it's a good tool to have in our toolbox..JPG)
The tomatoes are looking fantastic out there, and with the warm weather forecasted for the next week, I am hopeful that we can be finished with hauling row cover on and off of hoophouse crops for the rest of the spring. That said, I am not foolish enough to pack that row cover up yet - just like when you put your snow shovel away, it's sure to snow again! By the way, our snow shovels are still sitting outside the front door... .JPG)
From all of us here at the farm (canines included!) here's to a sunny weekend and warmer weather on the way.
Happy Mother's Day weekend!
In community,
Farmer Chris
Great Oak Farm
