I was fortunate to not have to work off the farm for the last couple of days. It allowed me to catch up on some much needed field work. Despite suffering from severe grass polen allergies, I just had to mow. It looks so much better. I have to admit I was getting a bit discouraged with the way things were looking around the home farm. When the grass is overgrown and there are weeds everywhere the farm tends to look uncared for. So with a morning of mowing and a full day of weeding things are starting to look nore like they normally do. In addition we also got the peppers and eggplants planted out in the greenhouse and the drip irrigation installed. I was also able to till and set new beds that are slated to be re-sown today. It's time to put in more greens, beets and carrots. We also brought in a huge harvest of peas. They are coming on so fast I'm sure we'll have another big harvest on Friday. I love it when we can take large quantities of an item to feature at the market. Last week it was carrots, this week it will be peas and hopefully strawberries.
We've had some extra hands this week too and I can't express enough my relief and gratitude. I have been exhausted lately and yesterday gave me just a bit of a breather. I layed down for a little cat nap at about 6:30 and slept right through the night, fully clothed! So much for a wild night of solstice celebrating. I think I needed the rest more than I realized.
Today is harvest day for our commercial accounts. Business is picking up around the island and it directly affects the size of the harvest. We'll have a big day picking, packing and delivering. We are harvesting the first succesion of broccoli today along with greens, carrots, beets, pea shoots, kohlrabi, gailann, scallions and strawberries. The bounty continues!
For those of you who may be interested, we also have the very first certified organic cherries of the season. We are storing them in our walk-in cooler for our friend/grower Bruce Spencer. They arrived yesterday from the Wenatche area. We have about 800lbs in the cooler right now. We'll have that many more coming in for the next few weeks. They will be for sale at the market or you may special order them directly through us here. I think they are around $7.00/lb and boy are they tasty.
Well, It's time to ro;;. I need to get get a good jump on the day here. Happy summer.
Keep well,
John the farmer
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In all of my years of farming, I have never seen a crop of peas like we have this year. Simply outrageous! They are so prolific and coming on so fast it's unclear how we will be able to keep up with picking them. Not a bad problem I suppose. I think this year the weather has just been perfect for peas. Not too hot and good amounts of perfectly timed rainfall. We'll have to dedicate an afternoon this week for harvesting. I would'nt be surpised to see 100 pounds. Strawberries are coming on strong too. They are perfect. big, red and juicy. Just the way we expect. It won't be long for fava beans as well. They are forming large pods and maybe need another week or so. Fava's are a bit of a maligned crop. They take a lot of prep to get even enough for a simple side dish but the work is well worth it. I myself was never a big fan of fava's until last year. We dedicated a couple of hours towards shelling, steaming and peeling the inner shell. We then placed the beans in a food proccessor and added a good amount of olive oil a little salt and fresh garlic. The result was a kind of thick pesto. Really great on pizza's or a spread for bruschetta. I now have a new respect for them and eagerly await their harvest. I hope the good folks of Orcas will agree. We have a ton of them in. Don't be scared. Give them a go.
We are just a day away from solstice. It's 4:30AM: and already light enough to work. There is so much to do on all of our sites. Weeding and setting irrigation is the general theme. We have some extra help on the farm right now so I fully intend to take advantage and hopefully get caught up. It's an off-farm work day for me though so I won't be able to get some of the things that really need to be attended to. Maybe I can take advantage of the long daylight hours? Right now allergies have all of my energy zapped so it's hard to carry on. Can't wait until they are over. The farm looks like hell because I can't mow.
We are getting closer to being fully planted out. We got in the final round of winter squash Yesterday. Just in time. Too much longer and they would'nt have time to mature. Looks like we have a couple of failed greens sowings so I'll be re-sowing some of those beds. I have my fingers crossed on some of the other beds I recently sowed. It's gotten really dry and getting seeds to germinate properly this time of year can be tricky. Overhead watering works best, but we do not have that option on our off site locations due to low water pressure issues. We use drip irrigation which works great once things are up but is not ideal for keeping a moist soil bed for prime germination conditions. Would be tickled for some rain but i'm dreaming.
Gotta get cracking.
keep on keeping on,
The farmer
John
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Yesterday's harvest turned out to be more substantial than I expected. This often happens. You begin thinking early in the week about what will be available for market harvest after all of our commercial orders have been filled. Sometimes you look around and wonder where the harvest will come from. Once you get into it, things start to come together. We have worked hard to nurture our restaurant accounts and to gain their confidence that we can be a consistent supplier. Over half of our business is selling to local restaurants. We try to fill their orders as best as possible with the highest quality products we have available. Often times that leaves us with not as much as available for market harvest as we would like. Market day is the showcase of the week for us and we love having an impressive amount and variety of fresh island grown produce on display. We have been successful at growing more product than ever before but sometimes it feels like we are still falling short. Demand still outways supply. I guess that's a good problem to have. The last few markets we have literally sold everything we have taken. That simply tells me we are not bringing enough. We should never sell out. My take on this differs from most of the other farmers I know whom mostly think that selling out is a good thing since they don't have to re-handle the remaining produce. With our walk in cooler we have the ability to hold product into the next week while retaining the high quality. If we sell out on Saturday we just left money laying on the table.
Today is the solstice celebration on the village green and the market will be cranking. We have the potential to have a huge day but sales will be limited to product on hand.
I certainly wish we had more to offer. This is that semi tricky time of year when summer crops are just starting to come on but not quite in full force yet. That said we will have a larger amount and variety of produce than we've had all season. Here's a sample of what will be at market.
salad greens, braising greens, snow peas, sugar snap peas, broccoli, gailann, strawberries, carrots, beets, kohlrabi, spinach, pea shoots, scallions, eggs and kale.
Not bad, we have a plethera of carrots and beets and salad greens. It will be impressive.
Solstice is one of my favorite celebration. Today will be a blast.
Keep well,
farmer John
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Smells like rain. I hope it does. It's been hard to get irrigation on with all of the other activities going on around here. We could use a break today for sure.
It's market harvest day. We'll be bringing in a ton of beets and carrots. We will also have salad greens, spinach, braising greens. strawberries and perhaps some broccoli? We harvested peas pretty hard yesterday so i'm not for sure there will be any on today. Next week we'll have more variety. It seems like we have a litlle less variety this year but we have gone deeper in selected items. We are sowing alot of new things right now so later in the season you can expect to see more. We are focusing on fall crops right now. We'll be placing follow-up seed orders and sowing more hardy varieties. This is an area where we can really excell and lead the pack. We do grow year round and having an abundance of produce going into the fall and winter helps us even things out on the cash flow side. It also illustrates to our community the abiliity we have by living in such a unique climate zone to grow a wide variety and abundant amount of produce.
One last thing. Here is an example of why it pays to buy from your local growers. In the grocery store right now, you can purchase organic strawberries for $6.00 per pint. They look OK. They were most likely grown in California and shipped here. At MRF, our price is $4.00 per pint. If you buy an entire flat (12 pints) the price is $40.00. That equates to $3.33 per pint. When you get berries from us, they have been out of the field just hours. They were grown using organic methods and are free of any pesticides or chemical fertilizers. They are not trucked hundreds of miles.
Your money stays in your community and you are receiving a higher quality product at a lower price. Hmmm. Sounds like a win win to me. On this note, I would encourage anyone to compare prices at the grocery VS. your local growers You will find that we are often less expensive and when you consider quality, you will always be ahead. We'll talk more about this later; Now, I must go harvest.
See you at the Market!
Farmer John
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We had another good day Wednesday. I finished my off farm work early and rallied for a late afternoon session of irrigation installation and weeding. Getting water going on our newly sown crops is critical right now so we'll have good germination. Missing just one small step in the process can make all of the other work that went into getting everything ready to plant for not. We are definately under the gun. I hope we get a little more rain just to give me a couple of extra days.
We also got into some quality weeding time. We are basically saving crops right now. waiting too much longer would mean there would simply be nothing to harvest. It's been difficult to keep up on it all. We are making progress though. Abby spent all day on strawberries. The plants are loaded. We still have at least one more day of weeding on them. I will never plant strawberries without plastic mulch again! it's simply overwhelming to keep up on the weeds. You have to be so careful not to damage the plants as you go so it is arduous to say the least.
Today is a harvest day for our commercial accounts and we can begin harvesting a few things for Saturday market such as beets and carrots. Harvest days are deifnately becomming longer as more things are coming on. Some of those things simply take longer to harvest than others. Strawberries for example. It can take a crew of four people a solid two hours to pick what's on. That said, fresh strawberries are in high demand and bring top dollar at market. I don't know if we could ever grow enough to supply the demand, at least this time of the season. Strawberries are our second highest volume item after salad greens. Potatoes generally come in third. Technically speaking, we make more money on potatoes though simply due to the fact that there is much less labor involved. However, it's unclear to me at this point on just how we are going to hand harvest one acre of potatoes? Better start thinking about a mechanical potato harvester.
Looking forward to the weekend, there seems to be magic in the air.
Lets roll!
Your Farmer,
John
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