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.

Everything Covered?

Our cover crop. "Sit Copper! I said sit! Copperrrrr!" (Our Jack Russel Terror!)

Our organic transplant venture for our value added products is off and running. The input supplies have started trickling in. Our soil, flats, peat pots and some of our organic seeds have arrived and we will begin sowing seeds this week. I’m still waiting for some seeds to come in and then we will have everything ready. We will be doing a bell pepper, a slicing tomato, cherry tomatoes, jalapeno pepper, six different herbs, broccoli, cabbage, and eggplant. That should be a good assortment. If they don’t sell, I can use them in the trial gardens. I just hope I can have them ready quick enough to make it to the market and to a trade show I hope to exhibit at. That gives me about 5 weeks. That should just make it in time. We will see. I hope the weather works with us. Keep your fingers crossed.
Our cover crop of ryegrass is doing well. I planted it to keep the weeds down in our warm season crop area. It looks great and it did do an excellent job of keeping weeds to a minimum and it will add organic matter to the crop area. In retrospect, I should have planted a nitrogen fixing cover crop to add nitrogen to the soil. I have been doing some research on this and am still figuring out how to effectively use cover crops. It is a different concept from conventional growing on how to fertilize plant by getting the soil fertile enough to grow a crop. In conventional growing you just keep dumping fertilizer until you reach the fertility level you need. I just read a very good article from HortScience (43:27-33. Use of the Cover Crop Weed Index to Evaluate Weed Suppression by Cover Crops in Organic Citrus Orchards) from this month. The study was in a section on organic horticulture research. The article was from the University of Florida (my alma mater, Go Gator Nation!) on the cover crop effectiveness in reducing weeds in young citrus trees. They used combinations of plants, both annual and perennial. Their research indicated that mixtures of annual plants were the best plants to use, and provided both organic matter and kept weeds to a minimum. They used a novel and simple index for the cover crop effectiveness in reducing weeds. They took the weight of weeds and divided it by the weight of cover crop and came up with an index. Any ratio over 3 was deemed effective.
I harvested cauliflower and dandelion from our trials. The dandelion was bitter but that is my fault. I should have harvested it about three weeks ago. The cauliflower tasted great. It was the freshest tasting cauliflower I have ever eaten. I hope I’m not being too biased but it did taste excellent.

Bunny Buffet

This last week the Economist magazine confirmed our observations at the market last week. I just read that people will pay more for the same products because they view the purchase as getting a better quality or a preceived benefit. They view a lower price as being an inferior product. We will increase prices accordingly. Why turn away customers by being too cheap? This week I have decided to add vegetable and herb transplants to our line of produce. I am also considering cut flowers to sell at the market next fall for our value-added products. It has been hard to locate organic inputs to grow a fully organic transplant. The normal horticultural supply chain raises their collective eyebrows when you mention a need for the inputs to be certified organic. I hope to start planting tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, maybe some cole crops and herbs this week for our transplant line.
I have liquid fed the garden with my fertilizer mix. I have planted radishes, bunching onion, and Swiss chard. To see how well they do as well as get a fast crop of radishes to sell at the market to broaden our mix quickly. I have pruned the deciduous trees (e.g. peach, nectarines, and plums). These are low chill varieties bred for our location and climate. I harvested a few of the largest carrots from the plots this week. I have never grown carrots to harvest before, that I can remember. It was really exciting to pull them from the ground and see what has been going on down there since we planted them. It is very satisfying to know that I was able to grow marketable carrots. (I know they are not very straight, but probably still marketable.) I guess part of the excitement was not knowing how they were doing until I pulled them up from the ground. I harvested them mainly because the curiosity was killing me and to thin out clumps that were clustered too close together.