Notes from the field

What a beautiful week we are anticipating at the farm! After weeks of thunderstorms, high humidity, wetness, and heat I’m looking forward to this week’s weather. Even more exciting, our full crew is back in the fields for two final weeks before we downsize in September.
Last week we were joined in the field by an incredible bunch of volunteers, two members of our 2017 field crew, and Executive Director Tim in order to fill the shoes of our two apprentices on vacation. Thank you to all who pitched in!
We brought in most of our storage onion harvest (this week we will finally finish it!), kept our fields of fall greens and sunflowers weeded, prepared more beds for our next-to-final plantings this week and began getting fields ready for cover crops. We harvested over 1000 lbs of tomatoes and checked off just about every item on the to-do list. It was a whirlwind and everyone on staff seemed ready for days off by the end of the week.

This week and next I’m expecting our largest tomato harvests, so pull out your cookbooks for creative ideas to make sure you get your fill during tomato season!

This week we’ll make a big push towards prepping fields that we have finished harvesting for cover crop seeding. We’ll seed oats and peas on a few fields this week, which will provide strong growth before they are killed by our first heavy frost in fall. Oats and peas provide biomass, nitrogen, organic matter, and weed suppression. Because they do not survive the winter, they begin decomposing by springtime which makes them a useful cover on fields we are hoping to get into first next year. It’s hard to imagine thinking about next spring when we are only halfway through the 2018 season, but planning far in advance always makes the next year easier!