It's definitely that busy time of year around here, but at least we're getting some more normal weather! Harvesting has been taking the majority of our time at this point, though this past week was especially heavy with harvesting the roughly 5,000 garlic bulbs and around 1,000 pounds of red potatoes - but when things are ready, it's time to move! This upcoming week, we'll be playing catch up with some of the other work that has to get done around here, though, of course, there are always those bigger projects that need to be tackled.
Our big project for this week involves taking delivery of 6,000 strawberry plants. This is a bit of an experimental trial for next year. Typically, strawberries are planted as bareroot plants in the spring and harvested the following spring, but we'll be trying to speed up that process by planting actively-growing potted plugs now, with a goal of them establishing themselves by late fall for a full crop next spring. It's a more expensive way to approach them, but with limited space, it's hard for us to be able to pull an area out of production for a whole season. This allows us to plant the strawberries after other crops (in this case, garlic and broccoli), which makes the whole thing much more viable. This isn't our first time trialing strawberries and we learned a lot previous times, so, with any luck, we'll be looking at 5-7,000 pounds of strawberries next spring - we just have to plant the 120 trays of them first!
The flowers and vegetables aren't the only things growing around here! The chicks have been cautiously venturing outdoors over the last couple days and judging by the big jump in mini frog sightings around here, we're guessing they hatched not very long ago as well! There's definitely no mistaking it's summer around here!
Well, we're going to take advantage of this cloudy weather to do some work around here (that sun is still pretty hot nowadays!), so we'll leave it here for now!
Have a good week!
-Brendan & Greta
