It's Fair time again folks. This is the centennial year.
We love the fair. We enter our vegetables evry year. Sadly for the last couple of years there seems to have been a decline in the number of entries. I would just like to urge all of the gardners and my fellow farmers of the county to enter thier goodness. It's such a quality part of the fair. I just love looking at the beautiful display and unique varieties that are shown. We have some great growers around here.
We had about 35 entries this year. 10 blue ribbon and a few seconds. Proudly we took best of class in tomatoes and won a best of show with one of our new queen watermelons. I am already looking forward to nexy year!
If you hav'nt been to the fair, it's great fun. grab yourself a corndog and check it out.
Things are kicking in fairly well here. the tomatoes are really coming into their own right now. They have been taking their sweet time in ripening this year. Right about now is when they seem to taste the best though. Some of the heirloom varieties we are growing are the ones I appreciate the most. They truly have that old time taste that we all remember from days past. Yum!
green beans are coming on strong. We have one pole variety that we are growing from seed that we got from Sidney Coffelt of Coffelts farm here on Orcas. It's not the prettiest been i've seen but the flavor is to die for. They are real green beans.
We have some real good lookin melons too. i can't wait for them to ripen up and the chile's and peppers are starting to mature. i can't wait for chile rellenos.
We planted our summer squash late and then followed that up with an even later sowing which is just now coming on. I like having squash later in the season. All of the other growers have squash before us so I try to have ours coming on strong just when theirs begins to wane.
That's a general theme around here right now. Summers are a little rough on me with pollen allergies and heat. it's definately my low energy time of the year. Since we grow year round I am learning not to fret about it. Instead I look for ways to make it work to my advantage. Coming into the shoulder season with large quantities of late summer crops is something that works well for me. We'll be following up soon with corn, pumpkins and winter squash. Also experimenting with a late sown crop of basil in one of our greenhouse's where we had to remove som un- wieldly tomatoe vines.
Our highly anticipated acre of potatoes has been the biggest dissapointment of the season. Too many damn deer eating the tops off the plants. this was a new field for us this year too and I think it needs a little more work and tilth and a fence. I do not intend to give up. We can hopefully have enough of a harvest to cover our and fuel cost's. I'll plow, disc and till in a soil building cover crop. Perhaps we can get a fence Up this year.
We've been able to get some of our fall and overwintering transplants in the ground. We have alot more to put out and I really need to get a big crop of greens in. My window of opportunity is fading. Hopefully sometime over the next few days I can make some time.
Overall things are going pretty well. We've had a few slip ups but that's just the way it goes. We've had more than our fair share of wins. Lot's of publicity right now. Look for our story this week In Sunset Magazine. Is farming sexy or what?
Take care all.
Farmer John
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It's early August and we are just starting to harvest tomatoes. This year we are seeing them come on just a little bit later than we normally do. I don't have an explanation fot this. The weather has been so hot and dry one would think we would have seen them earlier. We have plants growing both inside our 20x 100 greenhouse and outside. So far just the indoor plants are producing.
We are growing about 30 different varieties, mostly heirlooms. It's a glorious sight to walk into the greenhouse and see the neatly prunned and trellised plants standing tall and just loaded with huge fruits of all different colors, size's and shapes. As we all know there is nothing like eating a fresh vine ripened tomatoe still warm from the days sun. So much so, many of us refuse to eat the tasteless off season fruits we get at the store. If there is one crop that optitmizes summer, it's tomatoes.
We happen to live in an area that lends it's self to growing a large variety of crops throughout the year. Tomatoes however are quite difficult to grow here. We've been skunked more than once. This year we gambled a bit by planting mostly heirloom varieties. (global warming's not all bad right?) In my opinion they have the best taste and are the most beautiful. They are also harder to grow and you take a greater risk of not getting a harvest.
Due to the fact that they are harder to grow they also command a greater price. I have to admit I struggle with that more than a bit. I just cringe at the thought of a customer paying $5.00 for one tomato! Sometimes I feel like people think we are gouging and are overpriced on everything we sell. On that note please do compare our prices with the grocery store you'll see we are very competively priced and our quality is far superior. We have had many a discussion about what to charge this year. I really try not to be influenced by what other growers are charging or by what the grocery store sells them for. I just consider how much time and effort went into the crop and try to come up with a fair market price that makes it worth our while to tie up valuable greenhouse space for such a long period of time and to cover our labor and input cost. Just as a reference though, heirloom tomatoes are anywhere between $6.00 and $6.50 a lb at the store right now. We will be starting at $6.00 lb.
We started most of these in late february and early March. So we are talking five to six months of coddeling before we even see a tomato!. Trust me when I tell you it is a long road and they take a lot work. We are constantly prunning and trellising to keep the plants active and healthy. We can normally keep our harvest going into late September or even October depending on the weather. Considering how long it takes the plants to yield this is a relatively short harvest window.
That's the news on toms. It's prime time for squash and green beans right now too. Cucumbers are coming on strong and we have peppers and eggplants on the vine. The corn is forming ears too! yep, summertime.
Keep well my friends,
Farmer John
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When I was a little kid, I used to call grasshoppers hossgrappers. My mom used to pay me a penny a head for them to keep them out of the garden. I'm pretty sure this was my first paying job. I remember spending hours in the garden hunting hossgappers. I know you'll think this sounds Icky but I used to pull the heads off and put them in a coffe can that i carried around. I cab still recall that familar smell of stale coffee and grasshopper guts. I would count out the heads and mother would pay up. When I was seven a dollar was a whole bunch of money and it wasn't too hard too hard to catch a hundred grasshoppers. Life was good then. simple, innocent. We didn't have to worry much about the things that kids have to deal with today. I don't want to sound like some old guy here but life is just lived at a different pace now. When i look back, I can say that gardenening has always been a constant in my life. Everywhere I have lived I have had a garden. It was just the way I was brought up and it was always something i enjoyed. Nowdays I'm a liitle more than a gardner but it's still my roots.
Anyway, I'm drifting here. I've been thinking about grasshoppers lately. I had an e mail from our friends and old mrf interns Shawna and Attila. They have started a farm in Purcerville VA. They are getting ravaged by grasshoppers. Something we don't really have here. Or do we? The other day I was working in the field and I saw a grasshopper! My first instict was to grab it and instanly rip it's head off just as I had done a thousand times before in my youth. For a half second I was seven. I laughed as I was transported to my youth. How did this grasshopper get here and where did it come from? I have seen them here before but it is rare. Please don't tell me we are going to have to deal with them as a pest. They can really eat! But seriously where did it come from? We live on an island. Are the eggs just here lying dormant waiting for the perfect weather conditions such as the ones we have experienced lately? Did they fly here from America. Perhaps a bird ate a pregnant hopper mainland and flew here and shat the eggs out? Weird for sure but hey, havn't you ever seen it rain frogs?
Keep it fresh.
farmer John.
ps. Oh yeah by the way, tomatoes are ripe.
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Thankful for the summer rain we had. Such a great feeling to have warm rain and the smell of wet earth in the summer. That smell always takes me back to my days of growing up in Arizona and the summer monsoons, which are one of two things I miss about the southwest, the other being the Grand Canyon. The ground is so dry right now though you can hardly tell it rained at all. Thankfully I was able to get salad greens sown just the day before and the moisture made them just explode right out of the ground.
We are in a bit of a dirth here right now. This is a little perplexing for me to say the least. We just finished the harvest of broccoli and cauliflower and the heat interfered with germination on the last round of salad greens. peas are starting to wane and the strawberries are taking a break which is normal for this time of year. so we are running a little short on product. The most traditional crops for summer are just a little behind right now such as beans, tomatoes and summer squash. Hopefully we will see some of those things this week. I'm a little bummed right now that we are on the short side. The only thing I can do is get out there and keep planting. It's also important for me to remember that MRF is a year round farm so of course there may be times when we fall short but in the long run we are the premier supplier of quality produce throughout eleven months of the year. In some ways it may even be a good thing? How could that be? Well, one thing I have intentionally done is to delay sowing certain crops by a bit to stagger the availability from the other farmers. For example it may be easier to sell summer squash later in the season when perhaps others are beginning to wane. This also helps the restaurants maintain consistency in offering seasonal produce on their menus. Even though I say I am a bit dissapointed right now, it still amazes me when we go out to harvest just how much we bring in. there is always more out there than meets the eye and I tend to be hyper critical. I Sometimes I forget the cyclical nature of the biz. yes, it's true, I want it all now!
The Farmer,
Juanito
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Well, some of you might laugh and shrug us off on this one but here on the farm we are playing our plants music. There is a cd called Sonic Bloom. I honestly don't know a whole lot about it but basically it's classical music combined with certain tones that plants are proven to respond to. You can laugh at us if you wish. It's one of those things that if you believe in it, it will work. I do have to say the plant health on the farm in general this year is better than I have ever seen. We have been foliar feeding with kelp emulsion which has numerous trace elements in it. We have also been using a product called azomite this year. It comes in a granular form and we combine it with our regular organic fertilizer. Normally, I apply the fertilizer's as I sow using a small side dressing attachment on our Earthway seeder. It lays the fertilizer right in the furrow with the seed. It seems to work great. As for the Azomite, I am sold. I can tell a difference. The main benefit is that Azomite contains numerous trace elements and minerals. If you've been up on what's happening with the soil you will know that vegetables now have less nutrtion than they once did. This de-nutrifrication is caused by a couple of reasons. First, our soils are being depleted by over-production and the heavy use of nitrogen based fertilizers. The second reason is that with the use of the nitrogen., the plants are forced to grow rapidly and simply do not have the time to absorb the minerals from the soil. By using the Azomite I feel that we are at least adding back to the soil what we take out and hopefully a little more. Azomite is derived from volcanic ash from apparently only one known place in the world. Anyway, I like it and will continue to use it.
What else is growing on? Heat lovers! Tomatoes are looking good. we are just starting to see some ripening. In a couple of weeks they should be on in full force. Once again we have alot of space and time dedicated to tomatoes. The past couple of years have been sketchy. We have taken pro-active measures this year based on our previous experience. Hopefully we (and you) will be rewarded handsomly. Summwer squash and beans should be on in the next few days as well. It's all about water right now. We are dumping it on as fast as we can. The pond is going down fast! I would love to see a little rain. The heat is needed and welcomed but it also makes things a little more difficult. It's harder to get salad greens to properly germinate when it's as hot and dry as it has been. We had one entire sowing that failed. It's my fault. With all of the new sites that we are farming there are nuances to each one. Especially with the irrigation. I will be re-sowing those failed beds today and changing the way the drip tapes are laid so the seeds will get as much water as possible. Basically the tapes have to be laid right in the furrow where the seeds are. We then have to come back and re-set the tapes so they do not interfere with plant growth. Just a small learning curve. The bigger problem is that when we have a failure it has the potential to really set us off. We are for all practicle purpose's out of greens right now due to my error. That cost's us money and bruise's the ego more than a little. We are known for having the best greens ever and it's hard to explain why we don't have them. Live and learn farmer, live and learn.
Fall and overwintering crops are going in. We are going big. It's going to be a bountiful year. It's looking to be an epic fruit year too. Lot's of plums!
Take care peeps.
Time to water.
Farmer John
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