Solstice Crops and Organic Inspections

Happy summer! I guess it's now official as of last week, although it certainly feels like it's been summer for some time now. All the rain and warm temperatures have continued to push the season right along and all the crops are growing like bonkers. Our perennial gardens around the house are in full bloom; iris' are just about done, but the day lilies and cone flowers have filled in. Tammara planted a new bed last year and it has been a joy to see new blooms nearly every morning. Here's one of our favorites- a peach colored double day lilly.

Escarole is one of the new crops we have started to harvest in the past week or so. For those not familiar with this green, it is a wonderful Italian cooking green in the chicory family. It looks a lot like lettuce, but is generally a bit too bitter to eat raw. Steaming or sauteing it mellows the flavor and makes it the perfect ingredient for traditional "beans and greens".
Scallions are also back on the market table recently. The crop looks good this year, tall and robust, but not too fat. These are great chopped on a salad or added to your favorite stir-fry.

Spinach continues to do well, with no sign of the spinach blight that took it down last year. The long hot days are starting to force older plantings to bolt (go to seed) faster than we would like, but hopefully by planting new beds every week we will continue to have a good supply.

Snap peas have been a bit of a disappointment this year. I planted 400 row feet of Sugar Ann peas and had less than 5% germination. I am convinced it was bad seed and not attributable to the weather or pests. On the same day I also planted 200 feet of Sugar Snap peas which came up fine. So we have Sugar Snaps, but no Sugar Anns. Unfortunately, the Sugar Anns are a much tastier, productive and manageable variety. Sugar Anns grow to about a three foot vine which is easy to trellis and loaded with peas. The Sugar Snaps grow to six or seven feet and are now a tangled jungle mess with far fewer peas. It's quite the adventure just to find a hand full of peas. We use the buddy system when we go to pick them so we don't loose anybody.

Crops which are done for the season include brocollini (Chinese kale) and salad turnips. We will miss them and look forward to eating them again in 2011. We should have most of our other standard crops through to the end of our short season.

On a different front... today we had our annual organic certification inspection. The purpose of the inspection is to make sure all our records are in order and to verify that the farm is in compliance with the federal organic regulations. We have been certified since 2002, so after eight years we pretty much know what to expect and the process doesn't take more than a couple of hours. I've actually grown to enjoy the process - the feedback is generally positive and it's sort of a pat on the back that we are doing a good job.

The process of review has forced us to become better organic farmers. Through our record keeping system we must track every crop from seed to sale. This means you must document where you bought the seed, where and how you planted it, when and how you fertilized it, if you used an allowed treatment for pests or diseases, when you harvested it and where you sold it. It's a lot of paperwork to keep track of, but it's all important information that you should keep anyway and will help in planning future seasons.

At present we are the only certified organic farm selling at the Saratoga Farmers Market. I honestly do not understand why more farms have not gone through the process. It does take a bit of time for the record keeping and it does require a fee (about 1/2% of our gross sales after a NY State rebate), but I believe it is the best assurance to the customer that what they are buying is really organic.

Well, this week looks like more rain and showers. Hope you all stay on the dry side.

Tweleve Step Program... to awesome salad greens

By mid-June the weeks on the farm have fallen into a fairly predictable routine: Monday - get the tractor work done, soak sprout seeds, soak mushroom logs; Tuesday - renovate greenhouse salad beds; Wednesday - harvest and go to market; Thursday - seed flats and soil blocks, transplant, weed if there's time; Friday - harvest all day; Saturday - go to market, come home and collapse; Sunday - sleep, read... catch up on everything you didn't get to during the week.

One of the biggest and most critical jobs on the farm is salad green production. It is quite the process and consumes half a day for two people every week of the season. From the start of our farm we have always produced baby greens in raised greenhouse beds. We feel that the quality and consistency can not be matched growing them outside. This quality does come at a cost, the quantity that can be produced is limited by greenhouse space and it's more expensive in labor and materials for production. However, the advantages include less dependence on the weather, better control of bugs and diseases, and no weeds to deal with.

This system is the key to our salad mixes and is the reason why our greens really are different from most other producers. In the greenhouses we grow arugula, tatsoi, red mustard, green mustard, mizuna, and baby kale. Some of these greens we sell individually and others we mix in with field-grown lettuce for mesclun. Here is our twelve-step program to awesome salad greens.

Tuesday mornings start out by re-cutting any greens that have grown back after the previous weeks harvest. We could increase the yield of this second cutting if we left the bed to grow a little longer, but overall yield in the greenhouse is actually better if establish a new seeding instead.


Next we use a flat shovel to clean out the top inch or two of plant stubble and roots. The tailings are piled outside to re-compost and eventually get spread on the fields.

Next, the old sub-layer of compost left in the bed is loosened and chopped up with a hoe.

Then fresh compost is shoveled into a wheelbarrow to re-fill the beds. Each season we get a huge truck load of compost delivered from the Vermont Compost Company. Their quality and consistency is excellent. We use their compost for the green house beds, as well as, for making our own potting mix that we use for transplants.

A load of compost is dumped in each bed. Each week we renovate 11 beds, which is a quarter of our capacity (44 beds in total).

The compost sub-layer is raked smooth.

Next, we start mixing ingredients for the top layer. This includes compost, peat moss, perlite (a natural mineral that provides aeration) and a natural fertilizer blend (North Country Organics). Ingredients are put in a portable cement mixer to thoroughly combine.

Loads of the mix are dumped on each bed.

And then raked and smoothed evenly over the sub-layer of each bed. If they are not level and relatively free of clumps, it makes it difficult to use the seeder.

A pinpoint seeder is used to evenly and consistently seed each bed.

Beds are then watered,

and covered with floating row-cover. The fabric helps to keep the beds from drying out while they are germinating. After three or four days the covers are removed for full light and air circulation.

If all goes according to plan, after one week the bed will look like this:

And after two weeks, this:

And after three weeks, it should look like this, at which point it is ready to harvest, and then the whole cycle starts again, week after week...

Hey, what do you know, that really is twelve steps!

Well, it's Sunday... where's my pillow?