Hey farm fans! We have a great selection of vegetables for you this week! I just harvested some delicious baby arugula! I can't wait to mix up some tasty salad mixes this week. We will offer both the salad and shoots mix and mesclun mix this week. We had a good lettuce harvest, so there will be a few more of those this week compared to last week. I needed to crop out some older Tokyo bekana plants this week, so there will be a good selection of braising mixes as well. This is perhaps the last week for salad turnips until our next succession is mature. I'm making muscadine syrup this evening, so y'all will have the first selection of our first ever batch!
Next Week
The kohlrabi is responding well to the increase in temperature, so I'm hoping we will start harvesting them for you next week! These are the purple kohlrabis and they are stunners. I'm going to make our first batch of mayhaw/red plum syrup and elderberry syrup, so both of those will be available in the next farm shares. 3 Board Farm let us know that eggs are almost back, so I'm hoping next week I will be able to incorporate a few dozen eggs into the delivery builder!
Farm Update
Kaden and I will be attending our first agriculture conference since 2019! On Friday we will be traveling to Tyler, Texas to learn about fruit and nut production in East Texas. Our climates are not that dissimilar as characterized by extreme summer heat, late summer droughts, single digit winter lows, flood events, and tornadic multi-cell storms. Sure, the soil is different, but we are going to learn and ask questions. Our Mom and her friend agreed to take over deliveries on Friday, so that we can attend this conference on a weekday. Thanks Mom! We adjusted our schedule this week, so on Thursday evening we will pack all of the shares, then head to Tyler early on Friday morning.
I love integrating edible perennial plants into our farm. One day, I hope that we have over 200 varieties of edible plants growing outside of our row production vegetables. I think it's so important for the suitability of our farm, and increasing the bio-diversity of the local ecosystem. We have several dozen varieties already. I am really anticipating the day we can spend a few thousand dollars and order hundreds of bare root fruit and nut trees. Now that we have all of the BCS implements, I can prepare large swathes of our land with contour irrigation and cover crops. Cover cropping for a few years will create the perfect soil structure for a mass tree planting. This Spring we will start our cover cropping our orchard with a mix of legumes, fast growing grains and grasses.
We placed our final seed order for the Spring! It contains nearly 50 varieties of vegetables, including more than a dozen we have never grown before! We will try our hand at developing the perfect edible flower mix. We will grow some new salad greens like claytonia, plus daikon radishes, carrots, and snow peas in beautiful shades of purple and red. I also ordered our squash and green bean seeds, which will be planted in one of our tunnels on February 14! During the Artic Blast, I was worried we wouldn't have the cash to order all the seeds we needed for the Spring season, but thanks to you--our farm share members, we did! There was even enough wiggle room for us to experiment with growing new vegetables, and bring back some favorites from past Spring seasons. I have high hopes that March-June we are going to produce some of the best and most diverse vegetables since we started farming!
