The Sky is Clearing

The skies are clear and the air is dry and Randy has been out on the tractor preparing the soil to shape the rest of the beds we will need for summer planting.  Soon we will have watermelon and cantaloupe to plant, and more squash and tomatoes and eggplant.  Two more beds of okra and eventually some pole beans.  All that will fill another 25 or 30 beds, and that will finish out summer planting.  Then we will be making beds for fall planting, which begins in August.  And getting ready for fall beds means cleaning out the spring garden, and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing!

This week we started digging the potatoes and finished pulling the onions.  The onions are now curing in the greenhouse.  Over the next couple weeks they will dry out and their stalks will get papery.  Once cured they will go into cool storage.  This is the first year in a long time that we have grown onions from seeds rather than buying bundles of onion seedlings.  We are pleased with the results.

I was concerned about the quality of the potatoes after all the rain, but we dug a bed of fingerlings and the quality is great.  The yield is a bit low, but I’d rather have a modest amount of lovely potatoes than a bumper crop of soggy, rotten ones.  We still have two more varieties to dig but so far so good.

The carrots have been more affected by the wet weather.  You have probably noticed some discoloration on some of the carrots.  This is the result of being in saturated soil.  We are going to be digging them quickly and distributing them immediately.   Hopefully the storage carrots, which are a different variety, will be in better shape.

So even though the weather is drying out we will be dealing with the effects our raining springs for a while.  But there is nowhere to go but forward, and there is plenty to do to take us there.

Small Shares

• onions
• carrots
• fingerling potatoes
• squash and/or zucchini
• heirloom tomatoes

Full Shares

• onions
• carrots
• fingerling potatoes
• squash and/or zucchini
• heirloom tomatoes
• kale