It's a rainy afternoon here and I'm trying to catch up on all sorts of officework, including updating this blog. My official excuse for the quiet on here of late is that I lost the charger for my camera (no pictures today, sorry) but of course the real reason is just that May - even a rainy, delayed-spring May - is a hectic time in a farmer's life.
But we are making lots of progress out there and things are growing fast! We had a very chilly mid-May, with a hard frost hitting very late on the 13th, but the tomatoes, cucumbers, and other sensitive plants rode it out successfully under floating row covers (thin white fabric barriers...basically the veggie professional's version of throwing blankets over your tomatoes on cold nights). Row covers are a key item in the vegetable farmer's arsenal. Thick ones keep the cold and frost off of sensitive plants, and thin ones are one of the most effective pest control weapons we have, especially as they don't involve spraying anything on the plants. Drive through the countryside around here in April and May and you'll see them quite often, on small vegetable farms or Amish auction patches.
The other simple technology we tend to use involves plastic or straw mulches. Straw mulch is pretty easy to understand and many of you probably use it in your gardens - a thick layer of grass stems to keep water trapped in the soil and stifle weed seed germination. But straw isn't perfect - it cools the soil off, traps moisture near the plants, and often contains more weed seeds than it should - so many vegetable growers turn to plastic mulches as well. Black plastic is commonly used to heat up the soil (good for early tomatoes, peppers, and melons), while white plastic will cool it off (nice for summertime lettuces and greens). Occasionally growers experiment with a whole rainbow of colors - silver is supposed to deter onion pests, while red allegedly ripens tomatoes more quickly - but black and white are by far the most common. Just like row covers, you'll see plenty of these if you drive through an area with any vegetable farmers. More mechanized growers have machines that can lay these plastic sheets on raised beds with a single tractor pass; less capitalized growers, and many Amish families, have to resort to shoveling soil over the sides by hand to keep the plastic in place. Since I fall under the "less capitalized" group myself, I put a few earlier tomato plantings out on plastic, but resorted to bare soil plantings for many of my summer crops. Now that June is almost here the soil temperature won't be as much of an issue, and I can mulch as things warm up to keep the weed pressure down.
This week is the official start of the CSA season here at Frost Arrow Farm, so those of you with subscriptions can expect your first boxes soon. New Cumberland market attenders will be familiar with most of our spring offerings: boxes this week will likely contain lettuce mix, baby spinach, radishes, and kale, with maybe a red romaine lettuce or some aromatic herbs in the mix as well. In the coming weeks the selection will expand - I saw the first of the garlic scapes peeking out today, so those should be on the list in early June, not to mention the incoming peas and zucchini whose progress I've been eagerly watching.
If you're not in the CSA as of yet, it's not too late! Let me know if you're interested and I can prorate your share so that you're not paying for any weeks you may be missing. If you're around New Cumberland on Saturday mornings, feel free to stop by the market too! It's still small but I see new faces every week, and new vendors are hopping in too as the weeks go by, so hopefully by the end of the year it'll really be hopping.
Dave
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