As the title suggests we harvested beets earlier than ever before this year! On memorial day we harvested beets from one of our tunnels nearly a full month earlier than we've ever harvested beets before. We were the envy of the Farmers Market on Tuesday! We planted an early variety of beets called baby beet which matures quickly but is a little smaller than our normal season beet. The tunnel gave us a huge head start as we were able to plant these in early April. The combination of planting early and growing an early variety yielded these wonderful beets that will be available at the Mankato Farmers Market and for Farm Stand pre-order shares.
We were also able to FINALLY transplant our peppers and tomatoes out into the field. A combination of windy weather, rainy weather and cold weather delayed planting by around 10 days. The windy weather is not ideal for laying down our anti-weed barrier and we generally don't transplant in rain and mud. We really were probably lucky we didn't transplant them last week because temps pushed down into the mid thirties on Friday night last week which is awfully cold for tomatoes and peppers.
We also continue to battle the weeds on the farm. Late may through the end of June are when we have the most weed pressure as our young plants are working to out compete and out grow the weeds. Coupled with frequent rainfalls and weed seeds eager to grow we have to work really hard to stay ahead of the weeds. Thankfully with the help of our walk behind tractor we are in good position to keep the weeds at bay.
Finally, and probably most importantly, we had a new employee start on Wednesday this week. Maddie started work on the farm and hit the ground running! She and Caitlyn transplanted over 1000 tomato and pepper plants on her first day and still had time to work on weeding! We're very excited to be working with Maddie this summer!
