Week 22, Season 2016-2017

I can see the light at the end of the tunnel as the season winds down.  Just a few weeks to go this season.  I have been doing the final activities to help the crops finish strong; a little fertilizer here, some weeding there, a broken drip tube, etc.
We still have corn and beans to finish and they are looking nice.  Cantaloupe and some new squash types are a few weeks away from finishing along with the new cucumbers in the greenhouse.
Strawberries are still doing well but the size is getting smaller with the heat.  I checked the sugar level and they are at 10% which is still very high for this late in the season.  I would love to do a sugar test with berries being sold in the store to see what you could get commercially.  It would be great to see how we compare.
The seed bugs are beginning to take over.  These guys live in the plants and eat the surface of the fruit and cause a bronzing to the surface.  It doesn't seem to alter the taste but makes the berries look like they are bad.  I've sprayed them with pyrethrins in the past but it just seems to slow the bugs down for a week before they are back.  Since we are so late in the season, I am going to leave them alone.  Having a week off allowed the Steed household to produce six quarts of jam and two and a half quarts of jelly (of which I will not be making again in the future due to the low yields and extra fruit and work that is needed). I have also tried making dried fruit and fruit leather.  The fruit leather came out good and is super easy.  Just blend up the strawberries after stemming them.  Add a little lemon juice and sugar if you want.  Then pour over a plastic lined baking sheet and put the oven on low at 140 degrees.  It took all night for it to set but it tasted great and the kids liked it. I sent it to school with them for a snack.
The potatoes are yielding great and will pick for about four weeks.  Leeks will pick for the first time this year.
Hopefully a good finish to a great year.

Week 16, Season 2016-2017

We have reached the two thirds point of the season and the growing is going well.  Cabbage, snow peas, red beets, cauliflower, and komatsuna will be picking this weekend for the first time this season.  I just planted corn, beans, and a few different squash this week.  I will be transplanting peppers, lettuce, cabbage, bok choi, kale (finally) and a few different items this week.  I also hope to plant cantaloupe and melon transplants and Seminole pumpkin seeds to finish out all this year's plantings.  Cucumbers were planted in the greenhouse this week.  Potatoes are up and running and looking fine.  The cauliflower was doing amazing and we had some that were about 10-12 inch heads.  I came back after the rainy days and they had hideous black spots all over the heads and I had to cut and toss them over the fence to the cattle.  It was a trial as we have done poorly in the past, so I was relieved that I actually could grow them.  We will be able to harvest about half of the trial section and I now will add that to our list of plants to pursue.
This is probably our last week of sweet potato harvests and am happy that we got about 13 weeks out of our planting.  I found a great recipe for you to try to say farewell to the sweet potatoes.  I serendipitously ran across a sweet potato soup recipe that was delicious and extremely easy.  It was in Cook's Illustrated magazine.  Did you know that if you have a Hillsborough County library card you can download tons of magazines to your reading device for free!  I happened to figure this out two weeks ago and was pursuing the magazine rack and saw Cook's Ill. and low and behold there was a great recipe for this soup.  All you need is sweet potatoes, shallots (I used onions), butter, thyme, and water.  That is it. I made it for a bunch of friends along with smoked ribs and everyone commented on how great the soup was.  Here is a link to the recipe.  https://www.cooksillustrated.com/videos/3101-sweet-potato-soup  Enjoy!    

First Harvest Nears for 2016-2017 Season

Our first harvest is almost upon us.  For two years I have tried to start the farm harvest of fresh veggies to our members before Thanksgiving so that our produce could be included on the menu of the festivities.  Unfortunately, we have had problems with seed starting soil and have lost our seedlings two years in a row form different causes.  We almost had that happen again this year but I was able to catch it in time so things weren't pushed back too far.  It appears that saving the bale of leftover soil over the summer causes pH changes that are not conducive to plant growth.  I made a quick change and bought fresh soil and things grew the way they were supposed to.

Two hurricanes didn't help things out either.  Besides rotting a few seedling trays down and killing most of our pepper plants when the plastic mulch blew off, we escaped major damage.  The eggplants were injured but appeared to have recovered.

I have adjusted our nutritional program this year and the plants have responded remarkably.  I have never grown such a beautiful crop of vegetables as I see in the field right now.  Everything looks amazing! TBTG! Our squash plants (zucchini, yellow squash, and patty pan) are ten days earlier than expected and we have been picking bushels of cucurbits already.  Turnips, diakon, broccoli raab, and green bean plants are also looking tremendous and should be close for the picking this Saturday (Nov. 12) a full two weeks ahead of schedule!  Goal #1 accomplished!

I have a few other harvest goals I would like to meet this year.  Goal #2 - Have lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and scallions ready at the same time for a delicious salad.  We usually have all of this ready throughout the season but we never have it all at once.  Goal #3 - Have carrots, cabbage, and potatoes ready for St. Patrick's Day.  A good Irish Catholic tradition for our family has been to have a pot of corned beef and cabbage for St. Paddy's Day.  Whether or not this is truly "traditional" is up for debate, but it is traditional in our family, and now has passed into the second generation.  I would like to supply our pot with Steed Farm's, fresh produce, for the feast day. St Patrick pray for us!

So the harvest forecast for this Saturday (Nov. 12) is lots of squash, turnip greens, diakon radish, broccoli raab, sweet potatoes, mint, and Thai basil.  Green beans are really close but may show up on next week's menu.  We will also have as a bonus avocados from the tree at the house and starfruit from the tree at the office. This should make for a nice basket of produce to plan some meals for next week.

Just to round out the news from the farm, the tomato transplants are planted in the house along with the cucumber seeds.  The carrots have been sown this last week along with a fresh crop of broccoli raab and cilantro.   We should be transplanting to the field, bok choi, kale, collards, cabbage, lettuce, mustard greens, broccoli, and kohlrabi.  The strawberry plants are almost rooted and will be transplanted shortly as well.  Lots of work ahead.

Week 3, Season 15-16

Things are progressing well at Steed Farms.  Crops are growing well now.  The sweet potatoes are a little hit or miss depending upon the plant, this season, but they are much better shaped than last year.  We have already harvested lettuce for Week 2 and that is a new farm record.  Eggplants will be picked this weekend for another early record.  The new fertilizer is working well and it is great with our new disc bedder.  I borrowed this equipment from Bilbrey Farms and I liked it so much I purchased one.  It is saving us many hours of hand labor that we normally would have spent.  I can also use it for cultivating between the row with sweeps (picture to follow soon).  I tried to use it last week and broke a wedge bolt that holds down the shank, when I was tightening it with a wrench.  It looked like it was porous metal inside.  It wasn't even an hour on the tractor.  I was able to hobble along and make a new bed with it using just one side of the implement.  I can even use it to cover the edges of the plastic which used to be done by hand with a shovel all the way down the row.  The nice thing was that I called Agri-supply and they said they would sent another bolt free of charge.
Our carrots are doing great in the raised bed and I am glad I tried this out this year.  We will be picking them way early for another early farm record if they keep growing the way they are now.  Green beans are about done as are the squash.  I should have planted one more succession of beans but I thought that it would be getting too cold for them to grow now.  This fall has been a warm one and it is slowing down the kale, collards, broccoli, and turnips.  The good side is that the warm season plants have kept on growing to allow us to harvest.  We will see how this winter turns out.

Eat Your Veggies

I was on the way to the farm to pick our Saturday morning produce and heard a very interesting People's Pharmacy episode.  I am not a regular listener of this show but really enjoyed this topic.  It was about increasing health through eating a Mediterreanan diet.  Mainly the thrust of the program was that eating fruits, vegetables, and good oils does wonders to your internal chemistry.  So naturally, any program that highlights vegetables and fruits as a plus for health and I perk up.   If you'd like to give it a listen here is the podcast link  http://www.peoplespharmacy.com/2015/04/15/show-989-the-mediterranean-zone-diet/

Week 10, 2014-15

We are approaching the halfway point of the season, which is hard to believe.  We are having varying degrees of success with different crops.  This year the lettuce is looking great, whereas last year we struggled to produce a couple weeks of lettuce.  We are now into our third week of lettuce and hopefully it will remain strong.  Broccoli is intermittent and started off poorly with a hungry rabbit.  We have had two weeks of harvest and will have to wait a few more for another round.  Last year the tomatoes were great with cherry and larger fruiting tomatoes aplenty.  This year the tomatoes are being affected by something to be determined.  Nothing has changed culturally except I have switched to a clear plastic roof as opposed to a white roof to increase light and get better fruiting.  That seemed to be the case until I noticed the 'Sakuras' getting some sort of leaf scortch or blight. It is now on the 'Charger' and 'Celebrity'. Hopefully we will be able to determine what it is.  Carrots are not cooperating again.  Two years ago we had the same issue.  Last year we had decent success.  A big winner this year is the sweet potato 'Covington'.  This will be the 10th week of harvest off of one row.  We have planted one row of red LaSoda potatoes thanks to help from the boys (Nathan and Noah) and some awkward help from a scraper blade turned furrow maker/hiller.  It took a while to get the implement to cooperate and I broke a hammer in the process, but it beat digging a trench and covering it by hand.  We will wait a week and plant another row.  I also have some 'Peter Wilcox' to try out, which is a purple skinned/yellow flesh variety that is supposedly really tasty.  We will see...

checking out the new potato furrow  

finished potato hill

snake in the field

Week 18, 2014

Our season is heading into spring and the warm season crops are starting to wind up.  Tomatoes are looking good this year.  I've got a few tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) resistant varieties as we determined from our UF research visit last season.  We are using Sakura, Charger, and Celebrity as our grape and round varieties.  We have seen less whiteflies but the spidermites are starting to become a problem.  I've been trying to start a new shoot from the base of our Celebrity once they reach their determinite height.  I just add soil and fertilizer and cover the old stem and get the new shoot to root.  It is like starting a whole new plant.  So far it is working well and I hope to start the plants a little shallower in the pot and then add soil as new stems are formed for new plants.
Lettuce has been spotty this year.  We lost a crop from worm compost and then our back up crop failed due to something wrong with a bag of soil.  We finally had to buy some from another organic grower just to get a crop in.  By this time we got our fourth crop from our seeds in the ground just in time for the return of upper 80 degree weather. We will see if we can harvest before they bolt.
Our strawberries are doing better than I imagined possible from organic, in the field planting.  Commercial growers will run water for 10 days straight sun up to sun down, to set the bare root plants in the field.  I planted the bare root plants into trays and ran intermittent mist for a week until they established roots, then planted them to the field.  We probably saved 98% or more of the water over a traditional planting method.  I also only sprayed the plants with a fungicide and insecticide one time each.  That is the most amazing part.  It has taken up until now for the taste to increase in the berries, but now they are tasting like real strawberries.  We will see how long they last.  I believe we will add them to the list for next year if we can come by the transplants.  This process has taken me three years to figure out.  First was pots in the shade house.  Next was pots in the greenhouse.  Finally, I figured I would just put them out with the rest of the crops and amazingly they did the best there.  This has encouraged me to try watermelons and an Asian melon that we had a little success with a few years back.  I can never get the melon plants to stay alive once they set fruit.  I hope this year is different.

Here are some pictures from the farm...

A new tomato growing from the base of the old plant

15 Sakura grape tomatoes on one stem!

Collards ready to pick

Shares for delivery

Nathan sneaking up on a hawk with a camera

101st Blog Post

I can't believe that I have posted 100 blog posts since I started blogging 5 years ago!  I kinda feel like confetti and streamers should be dropping out of the ceiling and those crazy New Year's Eve horns should be going off.  Yeah!  OK, settle down.  Back to posting the blog.

We had something attack our hen house and then get three of our chickens.  It must have been something pretty big because it ripped the bottom of the door off and pulled the screen and the mesh off the door.  It also rolled the pressure treated post away from the door to start the process.  It must have been really mad and hungry.  My bet is that it was a bobcat.  I have seen one out just up the road in the pasture and one of the loquat trees that I planted had the bark shredded and I assumed that was from a bobcat as well.  One of the chickens we lost was the Amerucana that laid the double yolk, blue eggs.  What a shame.

I visited an organic grower in another county (Magnolia Gardens in San Antonio) today and it was nice to see his field.  His plants looked great.   It was interesting to hear him talking about his variety choices and they were very similar to mine.  He had a different red beet which seemed to grow well and he also had a couple of melons that I might try.  He didn't grow as many varieties of veggies that we do but what he did grow looked great.  In fact, it made me really understand how much better I hope to do next year.  He had a few ideas that I hope to try in the field.  He plants all his scallions in bunches instead of rows.  I like that idea and it will save a bunch of time.  He uses plastic mulch in his rows.  I don't think that I will do that but it is interesting.  He brews coffee for repelling ants.  It didn't seem to be working as I saw ants, but I will give it a try as they were eating some of my seedlings.  I will be using a few ideas I picked up.

In our field the corn is growing nicely.  The zucchini and the squash are doing better than ever.  The beans are just starting to ripen.  The greenhouse tomatoes are starting to go downhill.  The lettuce is trying to finish off.  The field planted tomatoes are green and ripening.  The pumpkins are looking good. The peaches/plums/nectarines, what little we have are almost ripe.  I wish we had more of them this year.  A few more weeks to go until the end of the season.

Here is a few pictures from the farm.  A lettuce going to seed.  A lemon tree with some fruit for next year.  I am very excited about this one.  It might be the first lemons since I planted the tree in 2004-'05.  The last picture is of a leaf with lady bug larvae that were all over the eggplant eating the aphids that were running rampant in there.  The ladybugs ate them all.

Mid Season

Another wacky few weeks of weather.  I finally planted beans and then a few days later we had lots of patchy frost on the ground at the farm.  I know this first hand as I camped out Sunday night with the kids and a friend with his kids.  It was literally freezing in my sleeping bag.  I've never been so cold that my legs hurt.  The kids were well bundled but I thought that my sleeping bag was more insulated and didn't bring back up.  So sometime in the middle of the night I needed to put jeans over my sweat pants just to stay warm.  My head was kept warm with a hat, hood, and my sleeping bag which I pulled over my head to keep from freezing.  It really made me think about what the homeless might do to keep warm.  We had a nice little fire and did the hot dogs, marshmallows, and we even had fresh eggs and cut up some oranges for breakfast.
This season has been tough for our cold season veggies.  It has been way to warm and "usually" we get a slower warm up and transition into our hot spring.  This year we have had a very warm transition but still too cool to plant warm season crops outside.  Especially like last week's freeze.  At least I wasn't ready to take the risk.  So there is sort of a production gap from the cool season crops to the warm season ones.  We should be fine harvest-wise but our cool season crops are stopping short this year.
The late frost a few weeks back has impacted all our stone fruits and loquats this year.  Some of our peach trees are still in hibernation mode and waiting for the right amount of chilling hours until they "wake up."  It was so warm that they never got their required amount of vernalization.These will hardly produce a crop.  The other trees that did break dormancy had their young blossoms freeze and fall off so we will get little to no fruit on them. I'm not exactly sure what happened with the loquat this year but it has very sparse fruit on it.  Maybe just too dry.
Our greenhouse trial with tomatoes, eggplants, and cucumbers looks good.  The tomatoes seem a little sparse and maybe a pollination issue or low light from the white plastic I used.  I'm not sure which or maybe both.  But I have been hand pollinating and it doesn't seem to affect the fruit set.  So I am leaning on light conditions which should get better with the longer day-length.
Jennifer is eagerly awaiting the carrots...Her favorite crop.  If I had to pick a favorite based on taste I would have to go with the peaches.  Looks like I will miss out this year.
I've got some pictures to show soon as I haven't posted some in a while.  Next blog will have them.

Week #3 Pickup

Things are going fairly well so far this fall.  Even without me at the farm for a few days and a pickup Jennifer managed well.  That is an extremely difficult task with three little ones to care for simultaneously.  Crops are doing well with a few flea beetles and aphids still popping up but not really as bad as some years.  The green beans (Provider) have done extremely well and I am glad I planted them.  It was a new variety for us.  I had thought about waiting until the spring to put them in but I can now do another crop in March.  Our trial of red Asian greens look great and taste wonderful too so I think that I will plant enough for a few pickups.  It looks like we have another winner.   The tomatoes are planted in the greenhouse and will be followed by peppers and eggplants.  The strawberries trial is doing OK, but they probably need more light than under the shadehouse.  I will be moving them into the greenhouse as soon as I get the irrigation switched around.   I made roselle jam last week and it turned out great.  It tastes like a cross between cranberry and cherry jam.  I only needed about 3-4 cups of prepared roselle to make the 4 small jars of jam.  Delicious and it past the kid test! Although most anything with sugar usually passes the kid test.
I almost forgot that a bear was spotted at the farm!  Buddy the Bear.

Anna got to take her class mascot home so Buddy made his way into some of the farm shots.  You'll have to "bear" with me on this one.  I did learn that our chickens are very cautious of bears.  Smart chickens!

First Week Pick Up 2011

Things are off to a good start at the farm.  Loquats are flowering, sugarcane is ready, the roselle is tasting nice, and the bok choi looks awesome.  One half of the beans are doing phenomenal.  The other half is not looking so great.  I did the exact same thing to the two rows.  The front half is full of beautiful picture perfect beans.  The back half is still producing but not like the front.  Very perplexing.
A few of the usual suspects are back as well...aphids and my nemesis flea beetles.  Otherwise things are alright.  I am still trying to get the greenhouse set up for the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and strawberries.  I've got the tomatoes in and the irrigation drippers set up.  I just need to order the roof plastic. 
I planted a few trees over the last few months two pears and an apple.  Last week I planted three persimmon trees.  One was for Karl Rossa passing. 
I hope to have a few pictures soon. 
I will unfortunately miss the first week pick up because I will be doing Extension work in La Victoria, Dominican Republic.  I have been asked to see if I can help out the village agriculturally.  Jenn will have harvest duty for the first time.  I called my Dad out of retirement to lend a hand which he graciously accepted.  Thanks Dad!  I hope things go well for her.  I'm sure she will handle it just fine. 

Week 20, 2011

We are slowly wrapping up the season. Thankfully it has gone very well. I am really excited about the peaches, nectarines, and the plums that have produced abundantly. Unfortunately, when they are ready to be picked, they are ready. The peaches have been falling off the trees and every night I pick them off the ground and either give them away or cut them up and freeze them. Jennifer makes a great cobbler. But we get a little bit overworked cutting up peaches at midnight. They attract a great deal of flies, wasps, love bugs, stink bugs, and bees. In fact, I got stung by a wasp while making a blind reach to pick a peach off the tree the other day. I am really looking forward to giving them to our members this Saturday. I would be nice if they ripen a bit over time. Maybe next year I will pick them early and let our members ripen them at home.

The corn, watermelon, cantalope, cukes, zukes, peppers, pumpkin and beans are growing pretty well. I am very disappointed by the new zucchini for us "Costata romanesco". It did very poorly being prone to viruses. Our saved zucchini seeds seem to be doing better. All in all it looks like we will finish well this year.

I had to remove one of the older Dixie Chicks from the flock last Saturday. I did some reading on the matter and figured I had general idea. It wasn't a pleasant task, but in the end it was best and it turned out fairly well. It took a lot longer than I thought. I had a bunch of learning on the job. The chicken ended up as Copper's food for the week. Next time it should be quicker. I think that a whole bunch of folk wouldn't eat chicken if they were left to the task of preparing their meal with a start of a live bird. You really have a whole bunch of time to think about things when you are preparing the bird. I feel that this week I will need to cull out the rooster as he is beating up on one of the older Dixie hens. Her comb is nearly off and he won't let her off of the nest area.

Week 15, 2011

Things are moving along nicely at the farm. Very low humidity with 60 to 85 degrees. The plants are growing nicely. Potato tops are looking good with a little damage from some Colorado potato beetles. The Italian (Nadia) eggplants are finally putting out a crop after being in the ground for 6 months and getting frosted multiple times. I'm not sure the plants realize they are supposed to be mature at the end of 3 months from transplants...well at least they are producing. Onions are starting to swell. I ate my first almost ripe loquat of the season yesterday. Not too bad. They will be ready to harvest in a week or two. The tomatoes are starting to ripen up well. Uncle Matt's cherry tomato is ready to harvest again. They are a farm favorite. I can't figure out what the red garlic is doing. I'm not sure if it has grown too thin or if it will swell in the future. The peaches are getting bigger and I can't wait to taste them. We have a bunch of plums and nectarines that are sizing up this year as well. The beets are almost ready to pick. We will be planting corn, okra, and more basil this week.


Here is a great looking recipe from Jennifer (one of our member supporters) for a mustard, fettuccine, and mushroom dish. Just click this link http://tiny.cc/kpuai Enjoy! If you have recipes to share let us know.

Week 13, 2011

It is quickly warming up. It is unfortunate that our lettuce doesn't stick around to enjoy. As soon as it starts looking nice it gets hot and bolts (sends up a flower stalk). This has happened the last two years. I wish we could figure that one out.

We have started to harvest the rainbow swiss chard. It looks beautiful. We cooked some up, boiled first for two minutes, then sauteed in olive oil. Anna said that it tasted like corn??? I think we decided as nice as it looks, we prefer bok choy or napa cabbage as a green side dish.

The peaches are sizing up nicely as are the loquats. It looks like it will be a decent harvest this year. I kept waiting at the farm for my mulberry trees to break buds and when I checked them they were all dead. I have a tree at the house and it grew about 15 feet or more in just two years. I was hoping that it would make a nice quick fruit crop, shade and some cover for birds. I was really surprised that they couldn't handle the low temperatures. I will need to find out the temperature range for that plant and rethink my plans. I seem to do that a bunch out at the farm. As in the case of my perches for birds around the crops that have bugs. Good idea for the birds to stop at the crop. It was working well. It also worked well for the farm cat. She loved the idea as I discovered a pile of feathers near one of my perches. I will need to rethink that idea and remove cats from the farm. I am waiting to find out were her kittens are before we let her go. I discovered my annual wren nest in the shop and it made me sick thinking that the bird would have to dodge the gauntlet to nurture its chicks.

I am beginning to think that we might have a few weeks of slim pickings at the farm until the warm season crops get ready to harvest. If the fruit fill the void we will be OK. We are waiting on zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, cantaloupe, calabasa, and watermelons. Grow! Grow! Grow!

Week 11, 2011

Its the end of February and it has warmed up considerably. The cole (cabbage type) crops are all sending up flowers (brocolli, raab, bok choi, napa cabbage, etc.). The first crop of potatoes are breaking their way up through the ground. The peaches are forming into their wonderful sweetness that will be picked in a few more weeks.

The chickens are only laying a few eggs a week. We had some for breakfast the other day and I took a picture of the comparison of ours and a nutritious vegetarian, Omega-3, cage free, store bought. Ours is the darker one. It definitely looks different and the yolk stands taller in the frying pan. I'm not sure if darker equals better but I tend to think so. Definitely prettier.

The hamlins oranges are finishing up. The lettuce are coming on great right now and look beautiful. Our warm season tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, squash and basil are sown and just starting their new little lives. I will be sowing beans and cowpeas soon and am waiting for the lettuce to finish up so I can plant the corn in their place. We will be harvesting carrots, oregano, kohlrabi, and cherry tomatoes soon.

Week 9 update

The season is progressing well. We planted our spuds two weeks ago and will be planting some more this weekend. We are trying the red LaSoda potato. It was bred in the Louisiana breeding program and is a standard red for Florida. We had some initial success on our third season growing potatoes once we figured out that ants were eating the older tubers and boring into the stems. We are going to plant a little more this year and hopefully we will harvest in a few months.

Carrots, and bunching onions are sizing up and are a great addition to the weekly pickup. I planted three weeks of Broccoli and used two different varieties and it seems that it all came on at the same time. It can be a really large challenge to plan the season out ahead of time with so many changing variables especially counting the weather.

The arugula is starting to flower which will take it out of production, but I planted a back up that will be maturing later on.

The large tomatoes are shutting down but I planted seeds for a spring crop last week. It was interesting to see Uncle Matt's wild tomato take a breather this week. The plants had a growth spurt for the last two weeks with new growth and a bunch of flowers showing. There will be gobs of cherry tomatoes in a few weeks when they all ripen up. I also planted peppers and eggplant again for this spring. I placed an order for some sweet peppers, corn, and a few beans I am hoping to trial this year. I was also reading one of the bloggers I follow and he mentioned a squash called costata romanesco as a good producer as far as disease goes so I thought that I would give it a trial. I almost thought about planting for the spring and summer this weekend but with near freezing weather this week I figured I would wait another week.

There were three eggs in the coop today. Looks like the girls might be getting ready to lay again.

Week 6, 2011

Things are going fairly well this season aside from dramatic weather changes. Our diakon radish are doing great and are very tasty. Jennifer put them into a stew last week and they were delicious. They almost tasted like a carrot but not quite. Mustards are looking good and the bok choi keeps producing. The tomatoes are still trying to brave the cold and we are still picking them with Celebrity far outpacing the other varieties and Uncle Matts wild tomato heavily producing the miniature cherries and still looking great.

The rye, wheat, and oat plot have tillered and are slowly building up their momentum to produce a seed head. The picture above is the small plot with rye up front then wheat and oats in the foreground.

The chickens are starting to lay a few eggs again. About 2 per week at the moment. I am looking forward to giving everyone eggs this year.

Pines Take Two

It was a long and gruelling week at Steed Farms. We replanted the Andrew Steed Pine Forest with roughly 6000 pines (8 foot between plants and 10 foot between rows) over 12 acres. We planted pine tubelings this time instead of the bareroot seedlings and hopefully they will do better than last year. They are about 5 inches of roots and 6-10 inches of tops. We were told to leave about 0.5 inches of the top of the root ball above the ground. Unfortunately the pine planter that we rented is extremely difficult to plant to a certain depth with any accuracy. It is a neat planter and the same one that we rented last year. But it doesn't lend itself to accurate depth of placement. So my father, brother, and I have walked every row of pines and when needed hand adjusted each seedling or planted a new seedling where there was a skip. We even planted about 6 rows completely by hand to see if that was faster. It wound up being about just as fast and easier on the body to use the tractor pulled planter. The weather could not be better for this planting. It rained the entire day we planted and some the next day. We had a few days of sun and then more rain and the forecast is predicting more in a few more days. Just perfect. We could not ask for better weather for newly planted pines. In graduate school I volunteered to work at a lab managers Christmas tree farm. After I was thinking about taking Martin Luther King Day off to plant the trees I remembered him telling me that he always tried to plant his Christmas tree pines around this date in the field because it always rains. That advice seemed like it worked this year. He might be a better climatologist than the experts who said that this would be a warmer and drier winter than normal.

One of the days this week before going out to adjust the depth of the pines we planted, I hoed the weeds in a row of vegetables. I stopped to sample a bite from a leaf of the komatsuna which I have never tried before and is a new crop for us. It is also called Japanese spinach mustard. It was delicious. I know this is hard to believe after eating our bok choi, napa cabbage, and brocolli raab, but it is one of the best greens I have tasted. It was almost sweet like spinach but without the bitter taste and with a hint of brassica flavor. I am really looking forward to its harvest. I was reading that you can harvest the older leaves like collards and let it grow through the Spring. I will be planting more this weekend. I have also been busy planting lettuce,cabbage, more napa, bok choi, and turnips. I hope to start planting potatoes this week and then start the transplants for more tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers.

Christmas 2010

Things are still going well but slower than normal at the farm. We still have green tomatoes but they are ripening up with some stem end cracks. The cracks usually occur from the uneven growth of temperature or soil moisture. Most likely it is the variation of temperatures from the 20's to the 70's in a few days. The zucchini are finished which is unfortunate as these seemed to be the best performing zukes we have grown. They were from one zuke that I saved last year. I forget to save a few seeds just in case we have a loss of all the plants and cannot harvest the fruit again. We will have to start back from a purchased variety and save the seeds again.
We planted the lettuce in our lettuce plot and I hope that we have a harvest like we did last year.
I started to plant more seeds out directly in the field to eliminate the soil aphids that have been appearing in the transplants and affecting the performance of the plants. I haven't thought much about not using transplants as there are benefits like you can control the growing environment better in the house until they are ready to go in the field. You also can get a jump on the weeds as the plants are about 4 weeks old when they go to the field. But there would be a reduced cost with labor and materials with direct seeding. There would also be less of a transplant shock. We will see how this experiment goes.

Christmas Comes Early

Steed Farms got our Christmas gift a little early this year. We are proud to announce the birth of the newest member of our family farm. Noah Benjamin Steed was born at 3:13 pm on 12/13/10. He was 8.0 lbs and 19 inches long. He is doing great and so is Jennifer. We are all trying our best to make his arrival wonderful, relaxed, and full of love.

This season has been tough on our warm season plants. Surprisingly most of the tomatoes are still alive and still green. The peppers got knocked back pretty badly as well as the eggplants and zucchini. I am not sure my thermometer is correct but it registered 20 degrees at the farm. I was thinking that it was suspect but I heard a report of someone nearby with a reading of 18 F only about 10 miles away. Maybe we both have bad thermometers! That is by far the coldest I have seen on the farm. The other plants are still growing but slowly. The honeybell tangelos are ready to eat and are looking great. I was reading about them and it says they are the connoisseurs choice of citrus. It is a cross between a dancy tangerine with a duncan grapefruit. I must say, I picked one to try and it was delicious with a deep gorgeous orange color. I hope our members enjoy them as much as I did. The radishes are ready as well. I never liked radishes until Cynthia from the Corner Store suggested I slice them and fry them in butter. Now I can't hardly wait for them to be ready. If you have never tried them prepared in that manner I suggest you give it a try. I am sure you will be amazed.