Heart of the Season

As you can see, the posts are getting farther and fewer apart as mid-summer creeps up on us and we find ourselves in the heart of the season. All is well on the farm. We are in the midst of planting and starting all the fall and winter crops and we haven’t even begun harvesting the summer crops! It seems strange to be thinking about eating winter cabbage in February when it is still July, but these crops get planted from now through August in order to have vegetables in October through February.

We recently gave a tour to 20 interns from various farms in southern Oregon as part of Rogue Farm Corps, an educational program for beginning farmers. We gave a farm tour as well as talked about poultry production & CSAs. It was fun to talk about the farm and share our experiences with budding farmers, something we really enjoy doing, but don’t have as much time for as we’d like. I have uploaded some pictures from the tour. They were taken by Khaliqa Rogmans.

Josh giving a tour of the greenhouse.

A nice view of our potato patch in the foreground, the tour and the farm.

Spring

Plants are finally growing thanks to this beautiful spring weather. Now, we’re getting somewhere.

Market should be beautiful on Tuesday and we’ll have all kinds of new veggies to bring including radishes, bok choy, broccoli raab, pea tendrils and pink petiole mustards.

There is still plenty of room in the CSA. We start up on May 18th. See our 2009csabrochure. Please email or call us if you have questions.

Here’s a picture of our April greenhouse. Full and growing!

Weathering the Storm

One thing I’ve noticed already about this year’s season is my ability to take the farm’s many challenges in stride. For instance, our greenhouse is very full and we haven’t had a dry window the last few days to plant out our 85 flats of spring crops. We still need to keep up with our successions so we’ve been filling our temporary cold frame up with newly seeded flats. If you’ve followed our blog and farm history at all, you know that we have had mice problems in the past, meaning we’ve lost whole flats of veggies from mice nibbling in the greenhouse. It was only until our wonderful feline friend Spunkie moved into the greenhouse that our mice problems subsided. Well, Spunkie doesn’t quite cover the cold frame territory, so today we found twenty flats of broccoli munched down, losing mabye 50 – 60% of this succession, not to mention several other flats of cauliflower and other brassicas. Now, last year, I probably would have lashed out at the mice, kicked flats, threw hoses, punched fences and maybe even cried a little. This year, I’m much more prepared for little disasters. I took the setback calmly — what I know is that it isn’t such a big deal in the whole scheme of the season — brassicas germinate quickly, we can reseed right away and still catch up to hit our planting windows. No big deal. We have so much diversity in our greenhouses and our farming program that this won’t make a huge economic impact. Sure, I’m a little stressed and it puts a small wrinkle into our week when we’ve got five million things to do, but we’ll make up for the loss and move on. Knowing how to weather the storm in farming comes with just a bit of experience. Market farming is not an easy career choice, but the challenges and problem-solving make it pretty dynamic. I can only imagine how easy this will all be in fifteen years, right?