Summer trials

Warm season trials

It has been a hectic couple of weeks at Steed Farms. Our whole family has been sick for the last couple of weeks, and I have flown to New York to share in the wedding of my cousin Bridget Steed. I met my brother Kevin, Dad, and four cousins from NY and two cousins that flew over from Ireland (Micheal Steed and his wife and Gavin Steed). Had a great time catching up. I designed my Brothers back corner for a garden and small orchard while I was visiting. He has a beautiful spread to work with. It is not too large to be much to manage but just the right size to be very quaint and productive.

After coming home I sold all our carrots to the Corner Store where they were having carrots as the featured item on a cooking class. I will miss not looking at them anymore and being impressed that I grew such a great carrot crop. I also sold them some cucumbers. We are at about 4 marketable cucumbers per plant at about .5 lbs per cucumber. That's not bad yields. They still look like they are going strong.

We are harvesting blackberries, blueberries, zucchini, and some tiny peaches. I can't seem to get my peaches to size up on the trees. They keep dropping off at about 1.5 - 2 inches. The bad thing is that they seem ripe. If any one knows what I am doing wrong please let me know. Our squashes are all virus infected and the melons are starting to go downhill from powdery and downy mildews. That happens every year. They form great fruit and almost make it to maturity and then the vines die. Cucurbit crops are hard to grow down hear organically. Our tomatoes are the best tomatoes I have ever grown. they look great and have a load of fruit on them now. The pepper and eggplant look fine now as well. The topical pumpkins are doing very well right now. They have huge flowers as big as my hand and tiny pumpkins started.

Tropical pumpkin female flowers

I have tied up the pole beans, eggplants, and tomatoes. I have also top dressed with the 8-2-4 over most of the plants. My daughter also helped me plant the ornamental corn.

Harvest Starts

The first fruits of harvest!

We have begun to pick the first of our produce. Peaches, blueberries, blackberries, squash, cucumbers, and our Valencias were picked this week. I staked up the tomatoes, the eggplants and the pole beans. The plants are looking good except for the virus infected squash. There are still a few that are not infected and we may keep getting some fruit off them. The melons are sizing up and the tomatoes are putting out fruit. The peppers are beginning to flower and the eggplants are growing nicely. I think that this is the best bunch of vegetables I have ever grown. I really believe that enriching the soil with a green manure and horse manure has helped tremendously.

I also have been collecting seeds from a legume that grows wild on the farm. The seeds have been ripening lately and I have been picking them when I have the chance. I have pulled up the plants and have seen microbial nitrogen fixing nodules on the roots. I figured that this plant has adapted to the conditions on our farm with the bacteria indigenous to the soil. It should be a good match for our specific farm conditions.

Looking Good!

Virus infected squash.

The summer trial.

Good news! We sold our first value added organic products this week. I was able to sell some of our transplants to the local hardware store and they have already been moving out of the store. We sold 6 trays of 6 six packs vegetables tomatoes and peppers, and 2 trays of 24 cup peat pots. The proprietor Ronald Stevens of Stevens Hardware liked the plants and would like to buy more in the future. I don't think that he cares that the plants are totally organic but it makes me feel really good that they are and people are buying them. I believe next year we will charge a premium for the organic nature of the product and market the plants a little better. The trials for our summer crops are doing well except for the squash which got viruses almost immediately from whiteflies. I bought a screen but then forgot that the flowers were going to need to be fertilized by insects. We have a lot of bees and other natural pollinators around. The French melons are starting to get downey mildew but the cantaloupe, galia melons, cucumbers and tomatoes are doing great. I have already picked about 4 nice cucumbers off the vines, and a few yellow squash and one zucchini before they got viruses. I planted our sweet corn, two kinds of peppers and eggplants. I fertilized with Sustane fertilizer to follow the recommendations and I have sprayed copper for fungi and Entrust (which is an organic spinosad insecticide) for bugs on almost all of the plants. We will see how things progress. I hope to have some pictures of things this week. We lost our camera and are trying to replace it.