We are just enetring the period of the season that we all yearn for. Everything summer is on and the harvest is bountiful. This is the time of year when it all seems to click. The village is busy with people which translates into the restaurants being busy which means we are busy too filling orders. The Saturday farmers' markets are bustling and our customers are excited to see the true bounty of summer, especially the vine ripened heirloom tomatoes! Thet are just fabulus right now. We get this for just about six weeks of the year. It's the best time of year for us as far as sales go and then we begin to see a gradule decline as we enetr fall. I am looking forward to a busy shoulder season this year. We are working hard to continue producing into the winter months. The pumpkins and winter squash are looking good and the brassicas we are transplanting out now are taking well. We'll be putting out the remainder of the fall and overwintering starts this week and also sowing radishes, turnips, beets and salad greens. It just seems to keep getting better every year. Learning the timing and varities that do well in the winter here is really helping us even out our cash flow and work load.
It looks like we'll start harvesting sweet corn this week. This is a crop I don't normally grow and frankly most likely won't grow commercially in the future. Corn takes up a lot of space and requires alot of water and time. The return is dismal if you are just looking at it from a financial side. It is fun to grow though and there is nothing like fresh corn on the cob. That said we are growing a variety this year that I find to be rather interesting. It is a black corn. Sidney Coffelt of Coffelts Farm gave us the seed. I think it is a variation of a variety known as Hookers Black. Sidney has grown this corn many years here on Orcas so I believe it has regionalized it's self a bit. It grows on a very short stalk so it puts more energy into the ears as opposed to foliage. Sidney says it has been the most reliable producer for her over the years and now it is the only corn she grows. As with many heirloom's It's not the the most beautiful thing you've seen but the flavor is exceptional. Corn is difficult to grow here in our cool maritime climate so when you find a variety that does well you should stick with it. We have a small patch that we are growing out for seed stock. We may have a small amount for the market.
It's time to get going here. It's going to be a big day of field prep, transplanting and sowing. These are good kinds of days. Tangible days. Days when you can look around and see exactly what you've accomplished and give yourself a pat on the back. There's something undescibablly satisfing about putting life into the soil. It reminds me of the reasons why we farm and gives me the encouragemant to carry on with the tasks at hand.
Live and eat well my friends.
Farmer John
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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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