Well, it looks like last week's pickups went well for those of you that had scheduled pickups; the in-town cooler seemed to work fine for everyone and when we stopped in a couple times it was right around 40 degrees, which we're glad to see given the time and cost we have into building it. It's always nice to get the first week behind us and get all the kinks worked out - it's amazing all the small details you forget after a six month break from delivering shares.
The plants sure enjoyed this past week's warm weather. They're still behind from how cool it has been, but now they at least look like they're growing. In the next week or so we'll be getting into a little more new variety - albeit, they're crops that normally we'd have at the beginning of June.
Now that the plant sale is over, we can focus all of our attention on the fields and hoophouses. The weeds at the new property aren't nearly as bad as they were at the old property, but they're still a battle. Fortunately, we've managed to acquire the right tools for the job over the past few years; it at least makes controlling weeds on around 5 acres of vegetables by hand manageable. With our smaller scale and huge crop diversity, it would be difficult for us to mechanize much of our fieldwork, as we typically plant one 200 or 300' row at a time. We've got lots of hands to help on the farm this year and with the new farm we've got a better workflow, which makes a huge difference in keeping the weeds manageable. Weeding seems to be one of the favorite activities on the farm, believe it or not. It's probably because it's one of those tasks that you can see an immediate improvement - there's nothing like finishing pulling the last weed from a 300' bed of carrots and being able to look back and see the perfectly weed-free carrot rows. Of course, in a week, there will be more; but at least for a few moments you can enjoy it!
We've finally gotten the irrigation hooked up; we didn't need it for much of the spring because we had plenty of rain, but it got a little too dry over the past week with all the sunshine (we're not complaining!). It's always a bit intimidating to turn on a system for the first time; you never know if it's just going to start leaking everywhere or doing what you want it to. Other than a couple small issues, we were up and running pretty quickly; we switched to a different type of tubing for our irrigation this year and didn't quite know what to expect. After last year being so dry and with no well to water with, it sure is nice to see we can run 60+ gallons a minute to sprinklers and still have enough to water the greenhouse and wash vegetables, It's a pretty big improvement from the 15 gpm max we had at the old farm, which meant choosing between washing vegetables or irrigating because there wasn't enough water for both; sure makes us appreciate the new setup a bit more.
Well, it looks like its time to go get out there and do some work; looking forward to another good week! As always, if anyone has any questions about anything, just let us know!
-Brendan & Greta
