New Additions to the Farm

The summer is officially winding down and it is time to start gearing up for the fall produce season.  The blog posting slipped away from me by the end of this season.  I cringed when I saw my last post being May.  Ouch!  Well it is time to start going through the seed boxes and taking inventory.  Then the fun part begins, when I go through all the veggie seed catalogs and imagine all the beautiful varieties growing lushly in my fields.  My farm looks the best at this time;  In my imagination with no weeds, no pests or diseases and catalog, picture-perfect produce spilling all over the beds for harvest.

We started early this season with some sweet potatoes.  This was prompted by an attempt of an extension agent bundling orders from a few farms to purchase organic cuttings from North Carolina.  We went with Covington variety and planted it at the end of July. This is a newer variety from NCSU and completely new to the farm.  Another new addition to the farm is us using plastic mulch for the first time on this crop due to the extremely heavy purple nutsedge weed pressure.  When plastic mulch is stretched tight over the row nutsedge will grow right through it.  So I left some slack in the plastic and it seems like it is working.  I think that I will use it for all the other crops this year.  The sweet potatoes look great thus far.  I hope we will have a good harvest for our first veggie pickup at the farm.

I also wanted to announce another new addition to Steed Farms.  The birth of James Andrew Steed 8/1/14.  He was 7.5 pounds and 18.5 inches.  He is a nice content baby and is doing great thank God.  Momma is doing great as well.  Welcome to our family baby James!

Sweet potatoes!