A visit with Farmer Roger

It has been several weeks since I wrote a general farm update. Since then we’ve planted, weeded, given our spring school tours, harvested our first crops, started our vegetable starts sales, opened the farmstand, welcomed our first Farm Tots, and signed up more Free Choice CSA members. We’ve been very busy, and pretty much stayed on schedule.

The weather still swings between cold, rainy days and bright sunny days, but we are seeing more and more of the latter. Last weekend at our Welcome Back opening celebration, while I listened to Mary McRae sing and play Hawaiian music on her ukelele while the temperature approached 80 degrees, I was almost convinced that summer had arrived.  Today’s cold downpour has put that idea to rest for a while.

 We opened the farm the first two Saturdays in May to sell our vegetable plant starts, a new project for us this year. It looks like our timing was good; a lot of folks are planning to grow more food at home this year. We’ll have more veg starts well into June.

The farm and farmstand opened for the season this last Wed, (May 13) with mostly greens in the farmstand and a good turnout from the Farm Tots. We had lettuce, spinach, frisee, kale, collards, mustard greens, Vitamin Green, French sorrel, lovage, chives, tarragon, sage, oregano, and mint. We had also planted bok choi and salad turnips to be picked the first open week, but they were ready two weeks early. The bok choi, salad turnips and some early lettuce showed up on the menu of Trellis Restaurant and in The Root Connection Farm winter shares.

Planting has taken much of our time and attention, with much of the season’s planting well along. All the onions and tomatoes are planted out. The early kohlrabi is in the ground. We have done the first plantings of carrots, beets, sweet corn, and summer squash, the second planting of peas, and the second and third plantings of bok choi, lettuce, and other greens. We planted most of the potatoes on Sunday, and will finish planting tomorrow. We’ve planted more lavender, mint, and sage for our teas and essential oils. We still have all the flowers, the annual herbs, the winter squash, the gourds, the pumpkins, and the corn maze to go, as well as additional plantings of carrots, beets, lettuce, greens, summer squash, and more I’m not recalling right now. As the weather warms, we have to schedule more and more time for weeding.

Here Keith and Stewart are setting up the low tunnels over our field tomatoes. Keith joined the Veg Crew at the beginning of May.

Keith and Stewart install low tunnels

The low tunnels give the tomato plants some extra protection on cold nights. We pull the tunnels off when the plants grow almost big enough to touch the plastic. If the cool spring weather hangs on unusually long, the tomatoes sheltered in the tunnels may ripen one or even two weeks earlier than unprotected plants. The greens in the center of the photo are kale (near r0w), Vitamin Greens and collards (middle row), and young kale (far row).

Tomatoes under low tunnels

Last year we tried a new potato planting technique that we all thought a great success. In prior years we used the typical approach of laying the cut potatoes in a trench and covering them up with soil. When the potato plants were up and the weeds started to appear, we would then rake more soil around the potato plants, creating a mound and smothering many of the weeds. Last year, in place of covering the cut potatoes with soil we filled in the trenches with somewhat composted leaves collected the prior fall. Spreading the leaves was a fair amount of work, but the payoff was big. We had very little weeding, since the soil was covered by leaves. The potatoes were much easier to dig, and the spuds were excellent.

Juan had the excellent idea of using our row mulcher to fill the potato trenches. We purchased the row mulcher to mulch our raspberry plantings, but we also use it to spread compost on the fields, since we don’t have a proper manure spreader. Last fall’s partially composted leaves jam up the mulch thrower, but this year we had some leaf compost that had composted an additional year. The well-composted leaf mulch spreads beautifully.

Juan mulching potatoes

In a couple of hours Juan & Luis did as much work as four guys accomplished last year in an afternoon.  This is one of those ideas that is blindingly obvious once it is pointed out, but someone had to see if first. Raspberries and potatoes are not the only crops that respond well to an application of compost, but the row mulcher is particularly well suited to the way we grow the two crops.