Season Start 2017-2018

I've taken a bit of a blogging hiatus since our last post way back in April.  I have been somewhat overwhelmed with work, fixing up a mobile home, caring for six kids, and making sure that the household and vehicles are up to par as well as preparing for the next season.  Usually the summer is a slack time from our busy pace;  not this year!  We lost a well pressure tank, an AC unit went out, someone ran over our farm mailboxes, hurricane preparations and clean up, and a work-cation.  I am running just to keep up with things lately and the idea of sitting at a computer late at night hasn't seemed that attractive.  Blogger has however, been calling to me and finally I have a free moment and will catch up from the last post.

Our 2016-17 season was one of the best seasons we have had in terms of vegetable/fruit production so far.  The weather was mild and cooperative and plantings performed well.  We added edible pod peas, spaghetti and acorn squash to our veggie line-up.  Strawberries exceeded our expectations.  All-in-all we had a "A-" season.  The biggest downer was not having kale for an entire season.  I just couldn't get it to germinate and stay alive to transplanting size.

This new season has started off with much difficulty.  Our farm received over eight inches of rain at field preparation time.  This greatly hampered our transplant starts and the formation of beds in the field as I wasn't able to get a tractor in to form our planting beds.  So we started off two weeks behind schedule.  Next we had some very cold weather during our warm-season cycle and that further delayed some plants another two weeks.  Usually we are harvesting mid-Nov, this season will probably start mid-December.  Other farmers I have talked with are in a similar situation.   Fortunately, we grow many crops over the season, we have been spared major damage from storms, and will recover.  So many growers in Florida have had a much worse time and have lost much of their crops for the year. 

Our sweet potatoes are looking good, squash, zucchini, diakon, broccoli raab look fine.  Our strawberries were direct planted to the field.  This uses a bunch of water.  For the better part of ten days, overhead water needs to run on bare-root transplants to keep them alive so they can grow new roots.  I used low-volume sprinklers to keep the plants alive until the roots formed.  This has saved me planting twice though.  Usually I plant them into trays, mist them in the greenhouse, and form little starter plants, then transplant the rooted plants into the field.   So I wind up planting twice to save water.  Since time has been my limiting factor lately, I tried the standard method that strawberry farmers use to grow plants.  I did notice some negative factors such as earthworms that recovered in the field (by using cover crops for a few years) were drowning in puddles trying to evade the saturated field and swamping other nearby crops.  Maybe I will look for rooted strawberry plugs for next year. 
That is a good start at catching up on things and I will continue in fill in details in future posts.  Looking forward to a few hours of sleep and a great 2018 season!