Strawberry Festival

I volunteered this year to help out at the local Plant City Strawberry Festival. I worked with the Plant City Historical Society. They raise money to help maintain the Historic landmark of the Plant City High School.

Here is a photo of the process of making a mass of strawberry shortcake.

It starts with the flats of berries.

The first step is that the berries get stemmed to remove the leaves.

The berries get placed into five gallon buckets and then moved to the wash room. The berries then get triple rinsed to remove dirt and debris.

Then the berries get strained to remove the water.

Then the get dumped into the strawberry slicer which cuts them into edible bite sizes.

Then the strawberries get sugar added to the bucket, the buckets get numbered and placed in the cooler to go to the festival to make the wonderful strawberry shortcake.

I know this has nothing to do with my farm but I did enjoy the process of moving berries along the production line. Plant City pretty much shuts down for the strawberry festival so I thought that I would join in the fun.

A new year!

We have officially finished our second year in transition and are beginning our third and final. I am looking forward to when we will be USDA certified organic. Our crops are doing as good to be expected with 80 degree winter days and 60 degree nights. Our tomato, pepper, and eggplant starts are doing well and are almost pulling from the trays. I just might plant them in the field instead of pots in the greenhouse. We are harvesting mustards, collards, arugula, herbs (cilantro, mint, oregano, parsley), carrots, and oranges.

I am not too proud of our cover crops this year. We tried a fall mix from Johnny's seeds which contained clover, rye, rye grass, peas, and vetch. We also tried a clover mix. Neither one did as well as the rye grass from last year. I think that they needed more heat to grow better. Maybe I should have planted them earlier in the fall. The clover is starting to grow a little better now but is being outpaced by the weeds that exist.

Fall mix cover crop.

Crimson clover cover crop.

I have added the moon phase to the blog. My brother asked me what does the moon have to do with gardening? There are a few things that I have learned from the moon phases. The moon obviously affects the tides. I am sure that it will affect the water under ground and how far that water will move via capillary action with gravitational pull of the moon. This is some speculation on my part but is not substantiated with data. I will try to find this. I do know that the cold fronts always seem to arrive around the full moon. I also know that lore says that you plant fruiting and above ground crops on an increasing moon (waxing). They also would plant root crops or underground crops with a diminishing moon (waning). I hope this helps some with your gardening/farming.

Still growing

Things are going alright with the trial gardens. I had to rip out the squash and the melons have all but died. It is the same thing year after year with melons. They look great, put out fruit, and then die right before the fruit become harvestable. Oh well. I won't try to grow them for a while. The peppers, eggplants, beans, corn, and tropical pumpkin are growing fine. I sprayed a concoction of Bt, spinosad, and oil to control a multitude of pests that are attacking just about everything in the garden. I would like to keep harvesting cucumbers but they now have mites so I think that will end them soon. I got great harvests off them. I picked about 2 pounds per plant.


I am just about to plant some herbs to see how they will do. Basil, oregano, peppermint, cilantro, and Italian parsley. That should be planted this week.


I have harvested most of the seeds that I wanted and will turn in the winter trial. I am growing a zucchini squash for the seeds and that thing just keeps getting bigger. I am surprised that it has gotten this large.

Seed stock zucchini 24" x 5"

In the front of this picture is a purple nutsedge flower. This is one of the world's worst weeds in terms of economic crop damages and loss. It is spread via seeds and under ground tubers. I spent about 4 years working with this weed in some capacity at the University of Florida in various weed science labs. I despise this weed for all the drudgery incured at school but admire its tenacity and vigor.

Spring Blossoms Forth New Life

Welcome Baby Nathan!

Welcome to the newest member of the Steed Farm and clan! Nathan Thomas Steed came into this world on March 31, 2008 16:05. He weighed 7lbs, 13 oz. and was 20.5 inches long. He is doing very well and Jennifer is doing great as well. His big sister Anna (20 months old) is handling her role quite well. Thank God everything went well. Jenn gave birth entirely natural. I am extremely proud of how well she did through the whole process. I had forgotten how little sleep we get in the beginning. I find it so miraculous that a child can go from not breathing air to inhaling his first breath in seconds. There will be plenty of work and play waiting for you Nathan as soon as you are ready for it!

A Carolina wren hiding in her nest.

Each year, much the same way that the return of the swallows at San Juan Capistrano, or the first Robins of the spring appear, or the return of the monarch butterflies are heralded, I too have inflection points throughout the year. Signposts of the season that remind me of the cyclical nature of the year. At our farm I always anticipate the finding of the Carolina wren nests in spring time. You can usually see them darting to and fro in the late winter hunting for a meal and nest sites. I have had them nest in tractors, one gallon stacked pots, and mostly in our shop. We have had them every year that I have occupied this farm. Sometimes they will have a couple of nest in a year. This year my father went to grab those pruners that you see in the picture and the mother wren flew out from her nest and scared the daylights out of him. I almost did the same thing until I caught sight of the nest. You can barely see her, but I assure you there is a mother wren sitting on four eggs in this nest. We always work around the nesting mothers since I like having them about. They are after all fun to watch and free pest control.

Spring Time

A severe close up of our first peach and blossoms. Sorry about the blur.

Spring has sprung. We have been bouncing back and forth from temperatures in the upper 30’s F. in the morning to the mid 80’s on other days in the afternoon. The plants are always confused at this time of the year. They don’t know whether to stay dormant or start growing. However, the grass is growing, the peaches are blossoming, and the citrus trees have their buds enlarging. Last week we planted about a fourth of the seeds into our trays, we are still waiting on seeds to arrive so we can finish our planting. I find that sometimes the produce market can be a great place to buy seeds. I bought some jalapeno and bell peppers and pulled out the seeds to use for our transplants. I also saved one of our cucumbers from last year and got all the seeds from that. That particular plant produced a whooping amount of cucumbers all season long. I was supper impressed. The fruit has even stayed hard since the end of summer last year. I am hoping to supply my own seeds on certain vegetables. I feel that if I harvest seeds from plants that don’t flower too early or late and that yield well, then I will in essence be breeding and selecting plants that are a perfect fit for my microclimate.

We have been harvesting carrots, lettuce, arugula, cauliflower, dandelion, mustards, and collards. Our romaine lettuce hasn’t grown well. I have harvested a few heads here and there, but the majority of the leaves have been mottled and misshapen. I can’t tell if it is thrips damage or a virus. A thrip is a very tiny yellow insect that scrapes leaves with its razor like mouthparts and then sucks up the juices. They are barely visible to the eye. They come in waves during the spring and are attracted to the color white. I remember back in graduate school when I had field trials, one day I wore a white T-shirt and started feeling an itch on my skin. I scratched for a while until it started to really bother me and I investigated in more detail. I realized that I was crawling with thrips and they were busy dining on my skin. Another person not wearing white was not as harassed as I was. Now I can tell when they are around because I remember what they feel like when they are rasping my skin with their tiny mouths.

I will start preparing for the market this weekend. I am glad I will have a better array of produce than our first market experience. I am also looking forward to see how our increased prices will fare. I probably will not bring as much landscape material and increase the amount of organic vegetables from our farm this time.

I hope to plant our new red leaf lettuce and another variety of escarole this week. I also hope to find some sweet potatoes in the store in order to plant them in our fields.

Happy New Year!

This week we weeded the entire trial garden. My Dad and I had some good conversation about how they weeded in the "Old Country" (Ireland) while we toiled. They used to plant turnips and cabbage in rows. He would work down the rows weeding and thinning plants. Sounds like things don't change that much in terms of weeding. I did however try his new hoe. It looks like a stirrup and is called double edge hoe or a loop hoe. It was very effective and reduce amount of time to hoe dramatically over the traditional hoe. I will be purchasing one shortly. It passes through the earth cutting the weeds at the roots and doesn't pull the earth as well as the weeds like the traditional hoe.

I made a batch of liquid fertilizer/compost. I was wanting some liquid fertilizer to start off our seedlings that I will be transplanting later on. I figured that this would give the crop plants a big head start with the weeds and help them out-compete their adversaries. The fertilizer is made from old compost, organic fertilizer, a splash of Companion fungicide which is a beneficial fungus that competes with other fungi, and water. I let it sit for a few days while stirring to add oxygen whenever I pass the bucket. I would like to add oxygen to the container without using any electric. I think a small windmill that could stir and add oxygen would be just the ticket. The seedlings are for the trial garden to find better varieties than what I currently have. I planted Eros escarole, Marimba red leaf lettuce and starting a trial of New Girl tomato.

We harvested collard greens for New Years Day. Eating collards and black-eye peas is a Southern tradition for New Years day. The greens signify money and the peas represent luck for the coming new year. I have heard of hiding a penny in with the peas and whoever finds the coin gets the luck. We prefer not to risk the unfortunate rendezvous of currency with an unsuspecting throat, and we all share the good luck by eating the peas. It's a little safer that way. Jenn's mother puts a little olive oil, sugar, and salt in a pot with the collards and boils them. The sugar takes away the bitter taste of the collards and they are delicious. Best of luck to you and yours this new year.