Get ready to garden, but look out for frost

We had a good market again this past Saturday, selling out of all our greens by 12:00, an hour before the end of market. Plant sales were strong, with many customers getting their cool weather plants in the garden. There is a frost warning posted for tonight (Sunday) and maybe for tomorrow as well, so hold off on planting those tomatoes and basil plants. If the weather looks settled by the end of the week, we will be bringing the warm weather garden starts to next week's market. This year we have grown over 2000 tomato plants of 24 different varieties, mostly heirlooms, but a few hybrids as well. We will also have a selection of peppers, eggplants, basil, zucchini, cucumber, lettuce, and other herbs. So get your back and knees in shape, your hoe sharpened, and get ready to garden!

For what was forecast to be quite a wet week of rain and showers, very little rain actually fell. None the less, it was a stressful week trying to schedule field work during the dry windows and greenhouse work in the wet ones. This is a common dilemma which I stress out over every season and is totally beyond our control. The farm is both blessed and cursed with heavy soils (high in clay and silt, and low in sand), which while holding fertility well, takes a long time to dry out. Trying to transplant, seed, or cultivate soil that is too wet just makes a big mess and will eventually degrade the soil. In order to have lettuce and spinach throughout the season, we have to plant these crops every week from early April until early September. If we get a real rainy period and can't plant, there will be a gap in our supply four to six weeks later. So it's always a relief to be able to stay on schedule. After some last minute adjustments this week, we were able to get the scheduled plantings in the ground.

Crops continue to grow, although a little slower than desired. We are still waiting for our spinach to size up as well as the scallions, boc choi, and baby turnips. The next warm spell I'm sure will push these crops along. We were able to start picking asparagus this week, which is always a treat for us. We put in a decent size plot five or six years ago - something like 1200 crowns. Unfortunately, it's a mostly neglected crop, and after we stop picking it in the spring we rarely visit the patch until the next spring. This means it never really gets weeded, watered, or fertilized, and as a result it never produces any where near its potential. We seldom have more than a few bunches to sell at market, but we do manage to have enough to gorge ourselves on it throughout the spring. We've been feasting on asparagus risotto, quiche, and pasta dishes all week - yum.