D&V Organics CSA
Week 7
Lots of activity at the farm in June. This is the time of year where the tasks always seem a bit overwhelming, and it becomes a little harder to keep up with everything. Looking ahead, we are excited for this year's watermelon and tomato crop! Our summer crops are looking fantastic out there in the field and we are eagerly awaiting their maturity. The bottom picture in this week's collage is of our potato crop. We recently checked on the maturity of our earliest new potatoes, and they are looking great, but need a little more time to gain some size. Back in February we ordered a couple thousand pounds of seed potatoes (that's how we start the new year's crop). Our seed supplier has a tremendous selection of different potato varieties, some red, yellow, blue, pink and all with different size and flavor characteristics. When we want to plant potatoes for the coming season, we order the "seed potato", which is potatoes that have been inspected and tested for certain diseases giving them the green light as "certified seed potato" (we don't actually plant potato seeds). In April, we receive the seed potato, which oftentimes needs to be cut into smaller 2 oz. pieces, so we have to go through them and make sure they are the right size to be planted. Around the first week of April, we plant the pieces in the ground in a trench, covering them over with soil. Every couple of weeks, we run a piece of equipment attached to the tractor through the potato field, trying to eliminate weeds and move soil in a hill shape around the base of the plants. The hill of soil helps cover the potatoes growing just under the ground at the base of the plant and makes it more difficult for weeds to grow. Soon, we will begin our harvest, which is a lengthy process of digging up the soil under the plants to expose the potatoes. Last year, we bought a very nice new potato digger that attaches to the back of our tractor and allows us to mechanically dig the potatoes and sift the soil around them to expose them on the surface of the ground.
Enjoy,
Derek & Vicky
