Week 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14

Well, the weeks have flown by and we have not had any time to add to our blog! The season has brought fabulous eating and abundance, despite the sketchy weather this summer.Here are some pictures of the weekly boxes, a nice reference and remembrance of all the season’e bounty. We are already missing different vegetables past their prime and dream of next season when they return to our plates again! In the meantime, the fall promises to be tasty and we are cooking up a storm with this cool, wet weather upon us now!

Week 8

Week 9

Week 10

Week 11

Week 12

Week 13

Week 14

Week 5, 6, and 7 2011

The last few weeks have been sunny, but we are still experiencing below average temperatures, slowing the ripening of the high summer crops. This week we started harvesting tomatoes,peppers and eggplant, but there are few ready on the vine as we await more heat units. The forecast is for continued cool temperatures, so we must be patient and enjoy the fruits whenever they arrive.We have been eating really well!

Week 5 2011

Week 6 2011

Skeena and Rainier cherries and apricots, week 6

Week 7 2011

Week 7's summer bounty

Summer vegetables are on the way

The next wave of summer plants are getting ready to launch out of the field. Once plants start to set their fruits and start the journey to creating seeds, there is no way to turn back the reproductive clock. These plants had a happy weekend in the warm sun, but with temperatures dropping back down a bit this week they may be a bit slower to mature.But mature they will and then we will make another shift in our meals and recipes. Until then we enjoy the current bounty, and wait in anticipation of the high summer fruits.

The first ripe sungold cherry tomato! Soon to be on your plate!

Annie discovering just how far along the potato plants are. We will be eating New red potatoes this week!

These are the first beautiful zucchini flowers and baby fruits. We love to stuff these flowers with ricotta or goat chevre, brush them with olive oil and bake them with the baby fruit attached. Fantastic!

A very tiny cucumber.

Baby Ronde d'Nice flowers and fruit.

This basil is going to be late to the party this season..

First eggplants are on the plants!

Tomatillos hanging like little lanterns. They are filling out and we should see them make an appearance in the boxes in a week or so.

The sweet onions are forming a bulb.

Corn is waist high now.

Green tomatoes on the vine.

A miniature green pepper.

Cultivating and Fertilizing

This season we procured a new tool to help nourish our soil and plants. It is a fertilizer bander made by Gandy Corp, which attaches to our Farmall Cub tractor, allowing us to cultivate AND fertilize our crops at the same time! This investment has already paid for itself tenfold, in that we can achieve these 2 different and essential tasks in one go. This saves on time, labor and fuel, reduces repeated passes over the field which is good for the soil structure and which ultimately grows healthy and nutritious plants.

Our Gandy Fertilizer Bander

Drew cultivates and fertilizes our crops simultaneously with our new bander attachment for the Farmall Cub.

In the past years our fertilization strategy was to broadcast a certified organic, chicken manure based, pelleted fertilizer over the fields in the spring before we planted. Broadcasting is not very efficient as the plants only receive 30% of what is spread. We grew some really beautiful plants but we still had some challenges in the field that we attributed to variations in the soil and the weather. To compensate for the uneven growth, we planted more than we actually needed for our CSA in case some of the plants did not grow well.

The fertilizer is calibrated as you drive and falls through the tubes which are placed next to the rows of plants, delivering it directly to the plants, saving time and money.

The hoses are attached to the cultivating shoes and help deliver the fertilizer to exactly where we want it to go, while the shoes loosen the weeds.

Based on extensive soil testing, we have been banding in different amendments, such as potash, bone meal, boron and feather meal, all of which are essential in helping the nitrogen to become available to the plants. Generally speaking plants cannot access nitrogen in soil below 55 or so, depending on the plant. When we plant in cool Northwest soils, plants will grow very slowly if not helped along. This very specific banding allows for the plant to receive 70% of what is spread and allows us to spread way less material, saving us some money. It also targets the plants we want to grow and we are not fertilizing the competing weeds. This has proven to be very effective and the results are in…even though it has been a cloudy cool spring our plants are thriving. The field look very uniform and are fairly pest free, which is always a sign of healthy plants and soil.

We have cultivating shoes that erase the tire marks in the rows

Week Four of the 2011 season

This box still contains vegetables that enjoy this unseasonably cool summer we are having, but we will turn the corner for Week Five and will be adding new potatoes, summer squash, fava beans and more carrots and beets! Yea for the sun shining the last few days!

Week Four

Week Four, we are really eating well now!

Last of the strawberries for the season, the first blueberies of the season. We are so loving the fruits from the orchards and farms of the Okanagon farmers cooperative.

Week 2 and 3 of the 2011 season

Week Two 2011

The season is now rolling along and we have been enjoying the fruits of our labor, cooking up delicious and fresh meals with no muss and fuss. The food is so sweet and flavorful it does not need a lot of embellishing.We are pleased with the way our farm is looking right about now. The fields are just so full and bursting and growing visibly daily.
The rain we have had the last few days has not come at the most opportune moment for many of our crops, such as any flowering plants and the garlic, which is ready to be harvested. We normally like it to be dry for a week before and after, so when we pull it it can be field cured. If the soil is nice and dry it actually helps pull the moisture out of the garlic and combined with the heat of the sun, it can be a simple week long process. Now that we have wet ground and no real clear dry week in the forecast we may have to haul it out of the field and cure it in our neighbors gargantuan barn, running lots of fans for a week or two. Not ideal, but as a farmer you better have a plan B and C as you never know what the weather will do.
Most of the younger crops really thrive from this rain, as plants love rainwater over irrigation any day. Last week we had fertilized everything on the farm and then with a big, robust full moon and the rain, we were overjoyed to see how big and beautiful everything had grown in a few days. We love our farm!

Week Three 2011

Week Three 2011

It’s all about water

We received two grants from the Natural Resources Conservation Service(NRCS), an U.S Dept.Of Agriculture agency devoted to helping farmers adopt and integrate better conservation methods. Part of the grant addressed irrigation on the farm and we have purchased 7 acres of drip irrigation and have installed it in many of our longer growing annual and perrenial crops,and plants that do not like to be watered overhead, such as the strawberries, raspberries, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, flowers, winter squash and corn. We also purchased an energy efficient pump to able to handle the different water pressure and volume demands that both the drip and large overhead pipes require. We record our results and the grant pays us to do this! Essentially these grants are paying us to become better farmers, helping us to produce more nutritious food per acre, while using less natural resources to achieve it.This is an area where the USDA is more compatible with sustainable farming methods and we feel is a great use of our taxpayers money.

The First Boxes of 2011

The first tender vegetables and strawberries of the season have finally emerged from the field, and the boxes were truly abundant and beautiful. All the attention we have paid to bringing our soil into balance seems to have have translated into glowing, sweet and nutritious food for all of us to enjoy! We have been working with Wa. State and USDA soil specialists, and have started to adopt new tillage methods in addition to amending our soils at different stages of plant growth for their optimum meal. There is always more to learn as farmers and this new soil science has us totally intrigued!

Anticipation

It continues to be an unseasonably cold spring-actually it’s technically almost summer though it sure doesn’t feel like it here. We’ve delayed the delivery of our first CSA boxes, as everything intended for those boxes is still pretty small, emphasis on the pretty though! Here are some of the crops we’ve planted, looking happy and healthy.

Rainbow chard.

A newly emerging snow pea. Looks like we might have peas for the first delivery.

We’ve already hilled the potatoes 3 times this year. It’s amazing to think those delicate looking leaves can push their way out of all that soil. We planted a lot of fingerling potatoes this year, as they keep well and are easy to cook with.

Planting the eggplant in 50 degree weather was an act of faith. We’re just trying to remember how nicely everything grew last spring, which was almost as cold and way wetter.

We found the 1st ripe strawberries this week. Even with not much sun they are sweet and delicious.

Green oak leaf lettuce, tastes as green as it looks.

We’ve started watering despite the rain, which actually hasn’t amounted to much. We did a good job labeling the drip irrigation last fall and were able to unroll it and hook it up relatively easily. We have over 50,000 row feet of drip irrigation in place. It’s nice not to have to move as much irrigation pipe and we’re watering the plants not the weeds. Here we are watering the newly planted strawberries.

It’s going to clear up soon, right?!

Heading out to cultivate

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Here’s Drew driving our 1945 Farmall Cub out to field. He’s going to use the tractor to cultivate (weed) the newly emerging seedlings. The tractor has a tool bar that you can attach “shoes” to, which drag along on the ground and bury the weeds between the rows of plants. It also tills the paths between the beds. Each bed contains either 2 or 3 rows of plants. You can see Drew cultivating the cilantro in the slideshow above. It takes a lot of skill and a steady hand to cultivate in the rows. One sneeze and you are off course and running plants over, a big no no! Fortunately Drew is a dab hand at all sorts of tractor work. We are excited to welcome him and his girlfriend Zowie, who is working with us in the office, to the Helsing Junction Farm team.