Busy April Days

April has been a busy time here at Minglewood Farm. As soon as the soil starts to dry out and the weather starts to warm, everything seems to happen at once. It's hard to believe that the summer farmer's market season starts in less than a week, on Saturday, May 1. It's always a bit of a struggle to have very much to sell at the early spring markets. Even with heated greenhouses, row covers, hoop houses and such, plants just refuse to grow as fast as we would like them to. Despite this, we will have a bit of salad to bring, along with sprouts and some early season garden transplants. Fear not, it won't be long before we have a full table of produce to offer.

Here's some recent scenes from the farm...

Baby lettuce almost ready for harvest

The full array of mesclun greens to be cut for Saturday's market

Spreading compost early in the season

Fieldhouse filled with lettuce seedlings

Planting the snap peas

In addition to tilling the fields, spreading compost, transplanting and seeding early crops, we spent several days inoculating new logs for shiitake mushroom production. This is quite a time consuming process - fortunately we had help from some neighbors and friends to get the job done this year. Here's what is involved in the project.

After you have your logs cut, each is drilled with 60 to 70 holes. This year I bought an angle grinder with an adapter to drill the logs, which was amazingly faster than using a regular drill.

We buy organic mushroom spawn from a supplier. It comes in a five pound block of spawn growing in sawdust.

A special tool is used to fill each hole with spawn.

After all the holes are filled, each hole is covered with melted bees wax. This helps keep the spawn from drying out and also helps keep wild fungal spores from contaminating the logs.

After this the logs are stacked to a shady spot and left for an entire year to incubate. The next year the logs are soaked in a water tank overnight to stimulate the production of mushrooms.

Hope you have been enjoying the beautiful springtime weather as much as we have. If you live near Saratoga Springs, be sure to stop by to say hi at the farmer's market on opening day.