Here we are at the end of January, with a great selection of fresh vegetables right from our farm to your home kitchen!
This week, we have a tasty salad and shoots mix, mesclun mix, plus a few bags of lettuce mix. Lots of leafy greens are available, as well as those Sora radishes, purple daikons, and candy carrots. I'm adding more kohlrabi this week, and I'll also include some recipe idea since some folks have asked. I love baked kohlrabi fries, as well as grated, raw kohlrabi in cole slaw! The link below has 20 recipes for kohlrabi, and there are a few that I really want to try this weekend!
Next week might be the last week for the Sora radishes and purple daikons. We lost an entire 100 ft row of the purple daikons in the Artic Blast (sigh)- I was really looking forward to adding those all winter long. Daikons and watermelon radishes have a tendency to bolt if planted too early in the Spring, so we will have to wait until after the last front to plant more of those. Don't fret! We have a large planting of Sora radishes that will be ready to harvest in 3 weeks, plus in one-two weeks we will begin harvesting rainbow radish bunches! Last week, we planted some French breakfast radishes and I'm really excited about bundling those in four weeks!
Farm Update
Even though we grow in all four seasons, I have the most experience growing during the Spring. Since 2015, starting a garden in February has just been a way of life. Even if I wasn't farming for a living, there is a wonder to Spring crops that is inherent within me. It's been amazing to add the Winter growing season. Juxtaposing our Winter crops with new Spring plantings added to the fields each week, gives me a deeper appreciation of the inter-connectedness of the seasons.
February is a month I look forward to all year! I see it as such a challenging opportunity to becoming a better farmer. The increase in sunlight makes all of the transplants from January grow quickly, but there is still a bit of uncertainty as we await what now seems to be our annual snow event. I'll include some photos from the last two years of snow on our Winter crops in 2021 and 2022. Snow used to terrify me, but we have learned by using the row covers that snow can insulate crops quite well if the temperatures are extreme. Snow is now in our forecast for next week! We start preparing tomorrow. It helps to add extra steel wire supports on every row to support the snow's weight on the row cover. We will also bury one side of the row cover, since we do not have enough weights for all of our plantings. It's expected to rain for several days before the possible snow event and freezing temps, so we have to expect to deal with row covers that are soaking wet. Those 8 degree frost blankets are really heavy when they're soaked, and lighter frost covers tend to rip easily when they are heavy. Most of the covers are 13 feet wide and 100 ft long, so thankfully we can cover 3 rows at once.
This week, we prepared the potato field block! Feb 14 is the planting date for the red Irish potatoes and the Yukon golds. Several of you have asked for purple potatoes, and I am waiting to hear back if we can special order some.
We transplanted planted around 500 lettuces, 1500 bok choy (4 different varieties) plus several rows of Asian greens for salad mixes. The weather next week is interrupting the planting dates for every other crops left in our propagation tunnel. Thousands of broccoli, collards, cabbage, kale, onions, and lettuces have been growing for the last month and are ready to be transplanted starting the first week of February. However, we might be pushed back to the second week of next month. So within 4 weeks of the new year, the crops plan is already off schedule ha! I can't wait to share the photos after we finish those transplants. I love seeing an empty field block be transformed after a mass transplanting. IT'S A BEAUTIFUL THING!
I hope you have a great week, and thank you so much for choosing us to grow food for you and your family!
