Sunshine Returns to Minglewood

What was that bright light in the sky this week? Oh yeah, the sun... it's been awhile since we have seen much of it. It was much needed relief after all the cool and wet weather of the past few weeks. The fields dried out enough early in the week to get mostly caught up on all the transplanting and seeding we had fallen behind on. On Thursday we even had time to start weeding and cultivating some crops. We still have an endless amount of weed pulling to go, but it felt good to at least make a dent.




This past week brought the end to the snap pea season on the farm. They had a pretty good run, harvesting for a little over 3 weeks. That's about all you can ever expect. We also grow a couple of rows of shell peas, mostly for ourselves to freeze. We don't usually sell them because they are so much work for what you can get out of them. It takes just as long to pick a pint of shell peas as it does snap peas, but by the time you shell the peas, you are left with barely a single serving. We can't really justify selling them for what it really costs to pick them. Despite all this, we will probably have a few extra to sell at market this
week.

Most of the other crops continue to do well, despite all the challenging conditions. The unusually cool and damp weather has really pushed the greens to perform well. The head lettuce and escarole are absolutely huge. The baby greenhouse greens have done well also. I think we harvested more arugula from the beds this week than ever before. For Saturday's market we cut nearly 30 pounds from 3 1/2 beds; that's about twice what I would normally expect!

We are hoping the next couple of weeks stay on the dry side so we can continue to get the rest of the fall crops in the ground. We still need to plant the fall broccoli, kale, turnips, broccolini, and raab, as well as, the late plantings of lettuce, spinach, scallions, boc choi and other crops we try to have available all season long. There is a small window of opportunity now, between the last of the pea picking and the start of the tomato picking, where we actually have a little time to focus on planting and weeding and spend less time on harvesting. So much to do....how did it get to be mid-July already!