2014-2015 Season Start Up

     We are off and running again on our 5th season at Steed Farms.  The summer is gone and our crops are being transplanted for everyone.  Today I transplanted cucumbers.  They were looking really good out of the starting gate.  I hope they stay that great.  We are still waiting on strawberries.  Beans, turnips, yellow squash, zucchini, and patty pan seeds are emerging.  The sweet potatoes are looking great and I am really pleased with our late summer planting.  I hope we can grow them again in the spring.  We will be harvesting for our first week pick up this year in a few weeks.  I have been digging a few up just to check.  If anything, they might be on the large size. One thing I learned is not to start them in plug trays.  The roots get all twisted in the small cell before planting causing some really strange looking potatoes.  I'm sure they will taste the same.
     This year I am trying something different for my seedlings.  I had to resort to using my own recipe for organic germinating soil.  It seems like organic products are really hard to keep in constant supply.  Vendors are always switching soil and fertilizers every year.  It becomes really difficult to get familiar with how plants react to a specific soil and how a new fertilizer behaves in the field and in pots.  After I was told they were no longer carrying my familiar soil that I worked on figuring out last year, I decided to come up with a recipe that I could duplicate each year on my own.  1 part peat moss, 1 part compost, 2 parts perlite, 0.5 parts composted cow manure.  It took me a couple of iterations and tweaking before the seedlings liked it.  But I think I've got a good mix that I can work with.  Besides it winds up being cheaper than what I would have paid.  Now I wish I could do the same for the fertilizer.
     Other things I learned from last season:
Never use wild radish as a cover crop,
Coyotes eat watermelons, and pumpkins,
Plant virus prone tomatoes on the inside of a green house and resistant ones on the outside,
Using plastic mulch might be a game changer,
Sometimes lost harvest knives turn up in weird places,
Chicken feather loss can be unexplained and be really slow to grow back.

A rabbit ate our seedlings early on.

Potting up more rosemary.

Covercrops for soil health.

Our sweet potato bed.

One plant!

Nate sneaking up with a camera.

New Additions to the Farm

The summer is officially winding down and it is time to start gearing up for the fall produce season.  The blog posting slipped away from me by the end of this season.  I cringed when I saw my last post being May.  Ouch!  Well it is time to start going through the seed boxes and taking inventory.  Then the fun part begins, when I go through all the veggie seed catalogs and imagine all the beautiful varieties growing lushly in my fields.  My farm looks the best at this time;  In my imagination with no weeds, no pests or diseases and catalog, picture-perfect produce spilling all over the beds for harvest.

We started early this season with some sweet potatoes.  This was prompted by an attempt of an extension agent bundling orders from a few farms to purchase organic cuttings from North Carolina.  We went with Covington variety and planted it at the end of July. This is a newer variety from NCSU and completely new to the farm.  Another new addition to the farm is us using plastic mulch for the first time on this crop due to the extremely heavy purple nutsedge weed pressure.  When plastic mulch is stretched tight over the row nutsedge will grow right through it.  So I left some slack in the plastic and it seems like it is working.  I think that I will use it for all the other crops this year.  The sweet potatoes look great thus far.  I hope we will have a good harvest for our first veggie pickup at the farm.

I also wanted to announce another new addition to Steed Farms.  The birth of James Andrew Steed 8/1/14.  He was 7.5 pounds and 18.5 inches.  He is a nice content baby and is doing great thank God.  Momma is doing great as well.  Welcome to our family baby James!

Sweet potatoes!

Week 22, 2014

I am officially old.  I changed clothes from work the other day donning my worn farm shorts and tee shirt.  Inevitably, I got distracted somewhere between changing socks and getting my farm sneakers on.  I remember slipping on my brown work shoes to bring them to the garage where my house Crocs reside.  Thinking as I did it to consolidate all my shoes in the garage for my return from the farm.  Unfashionably for me I never made the exchange for the farm shoes.  When I got to the farm and stuck my foot out the door to hit the ground running, I noticed my brown dress shoes, blue socks and work shorts.  I stared in disbelief for a minute and then it dawned on me.  I was officially old.  I did turn 40 this year but it hadn't hit home until I saw my brown dress shoes.  I did however, continue to finish the field work.  I figured that people couldn't see my feet from the road anyway.

The weeks are ticking by and crops are struggling with the weather to keep yielding (me too).  Kale has petered out, tomatoes are going down fast due to heat and the heavy rain a few weeks back.  Peppers are just starting to produce.  I have some in pots in the greenhouse and more out in the field.  I am just seeing where we get better yields.  Leeks are just turning ready.  We only had two weeks of sweet onions this year due to poor germinating seeds.  I planted some very late not sure of the outcome, but it looks like they won't size up until next year.  Our herbs have been doing great this year in the pots.  This was a good decision from last year and we have had a much better yield and consistency. 

I have been watching for some peaches this year and they were almost ready.  We had enough for about 1 week pickup.  I went by to check the status early this week and the entire crop was gone.  I'm not sure what took them but I couldn't find a trace.  Usually if it is critters they take a few bites and leave the seeds or half eaten fruit around.  Not this time.  I'm not sure what happened here.  There is always next year to hope for.  This year was bad for tree fruit.  No loquats either.  Our citrus have pretty much succumbed to citrus greening except for a few trees near the greenhouse which are infected. I am trying non-organically to keep them producing.  It would be really unfortunate to lose our great yielding lemon tree.  I'm not sure if we can keep them alive or not.  There are two olives on my tree this year.  This will be the second year of 4 years since planting that we have had two olives.  I only planted it on looks but I am always curious to see if they will ever yield an olive.  Two years when I ate one of the two that were on the tree, I learned that you can't eat olives off the tree.  Trust me on this one.  They apparently need to be brined before eating.  Which I know now for this year if they yield a harvestable fruit.  I'm not sure what I can do with two olives...maybe a martini? 

Our blueberries in pots yielded fairly well.  The boys love to go there first and check them.  Katie has discovered them as well and I could barely pull her away kicking and screaming because she couldn't find anymore to eat.  I hope to add some more for the farm for the benefit of our customers (as well as Katie's) in the near future.