Season progresses

Christmas is quickly approaching and I am not ready as usual. I plan on taking one whole day to do all my shopping about a week out. This mix of Christmas cheer and adrenaline rush is usually the way I take care of my gift purchasing.

The CSA is going well and we are getting lots of feed back from the members which is a great thing to make it better for the future. We are finding out that the greens are cooking down quite a bit, our supporters cannot remember what vegetable is what when they get home, and we are learning quite a few new recipes.

I am also learning how much to plant per supporter. Things like collards, mustard, kale, and dandelions need to have about 2.5 to 3 per person. Scallions you will need about 6 per person per week to harvest about 3 good plants per member. So it is great to figure these things out and adjust.

This year aphids and ants seem to be the biggest problems. We are getting a handle on the aphids but I am about to declare war on the ants.

We also broke our digital camera. We were getting a kick out of Anna discovering how to take pictures and the many shots she was taking of things like her toys, shoes, the blinds, Copper, and a number of countless items in the house. She wound up a little too over zealous in her photography and dropped the camera and now we have a black screen of death. We will be working this out shortly also.

The winter cover crop of rye grass seeds are coming up on half of the plot and is filling out nicely. This will be great for the added organic matter and weed control it will provide.

First Pickup

We had our first farm pickup the week before Thanksgiving. It was great to meet out new community of supporters. We have heard back from some saying that they really enjoyed the greens that we grew. We also gave them an extension handout on how to cook greens. It is always nice to have new folk visiting the farm and sharing stories about their lives and traditions. I find it really refreshing to visit with everyone.

We are slowly catching up to speed on the vegetable harvests. Finally the lettuce is getting ready after missing about 4 weeks of growth. Now that it has cooled off, the cole crops are doing what they should have been doing a month ago.

We planted a cover crop of rye grass on half of our plot to reduce the weeds for the spring and summer crops. We also have been watching the weather the last two days. We are experiencing a violent front that moved through the area but it has treated us very mildly so far.

We are slated to have our next pick up this week.

First Week Pick Up 2009-2010

We are getting ready for our first week's pick up on Saturday. We are a little bummed about how some of the cooler season veggies responded to the extreme (record breaking) heat we had during the fall growing times. We also were plagued by rouge grasshoppers that were probably coming from the fields where we were pushing the orange trees. The grasshoppers would fly in take a bite and then fly off. This really damaged our young transplants and set them back many weeks as well as caused a great disparity of size for our harvests. They ate the young growing tips off some of the brassica crops and caused a stunting of growth. I am thinking that the only way to get rid of them is to attract more birds to hang out near the fields. We will be planting some trees nearby to encourage our avian help to stop in for a tasty meal.



We also struggled with our lettuce. I have never heard of or dealt with ants eating seeds out of the trays that we planted before. But it happened twice before I figured out what was going on. I saw the ants the first time and thought that they were eating fungus gnat larvae. I have seen this before and considered them a help. I thought that we had bad seeds. So I replanted and then caught the ants in the act of making off with the seeds. I then tried to germinate the seeds at our home and then brought the three day old seedlings to the farm. The ants then ate the tops of the lettuce off. I have never seen or heard of this happening before. Another new one for the farm. We then germinated more seeds for a fourth time at our home and a clogged roof gutter overflowed onto the trays and washed some of the seedlings out. We are on the fifth attempt to grow lettuce and so far so good. But we will not have it ready for our first pick up.



The greens are finally growing well and the pak choi is doing great. We have a few other items and then hopefully new items will start coming on quickly. We are really looking forward to meeting everyone this weekend.