Planting Progress Report
Our primary round of planting is now complete! We will still have our weekly succession plantings of carrots, lettuce and other greens, but the bulk of the work related to putting in transplants and seeding corn, beans, squash, cucumbers, etc is now behind us :) We are experimenting with a number of weed reduction techniques this season, one of which is the use of a weed block paper that is approved for organic production, it has added a fair amount of time to the planting process, but will hopefully payoff with a significant reduction in weeding hours over the next several months.
Cabbage and broccoli on the new weed block paper
First planting of sweet corn has emerged
The apple trees at our leased orchard had heavy blossoms this spring on the Macintosh and Red Delicious and moderate levels on the Golden Delicious. Unfortunately we had a couple of clear, cold nights after bloom - we were actually sub-freezing on May 16th, and 18th - with a heavy frost the morning of the 23rd. As a result, fruit set was not nearly what we had hoped for, but fortunately not all of the blossoms were damaged and we should still have some apples this fall. The picture below is of one of the Red Delicious trees that does have some fruit started. (You can still see some of the brown blossom ends that were the result of the freeze)
Some of our Red Delicious just getting started
Strawberries in the hoop house are starting to ripen up! Distributions of the strawberries will begin this week and go through the next couple. Watch you email for notification as to when your pickup time will be.
Sunday's berry harvest
The chickens will be entering their 8th week and are growing quickly. They do seem to be better foragers than our previous Cornish Cross varieties. I'm very interested to see how the final weights come out
The chickens are "sizing up" nicely.
It looks like the first week of regular of share distribution will be either the 3rd or 4th week of June, depending on how well the weather cooperates. We finally got some rain last evening and have had a couple additional storms move through today. Before the 1.7 inches we received last night, we had only received 0.3 inches over the prior 20 days!
One of the Killdeer nesting in our fields (all three eggs hatched and are now little fuzzballs running around)
Updates will be coming more frequently now as we are getting closer to season kick off!