This week on the farm...

The first week of CSA is always stressful, exciting and busy!  It takes a few days to get back into the swing of things, and we're a little understaffed at the moment, so everyone has had to put in extra effort and time to get the shares harvested, washed, packed and delivered. After the CSA program begins, there is much less time left for us to actually farm.  Activities like cultivating, field planting and crop maintenance are put on hold from Monday through Thursday while we focus on harvesting. Fridays and Saturdays become extremely important days for us to catch up on work. This is what's been going on..

Farmer Matt is very carefully cultivating (weeding) our onions.  You have to drive straight or the fingers on the weeder will take out your crops! I made a short video of this in action that you can watch on our Instagram account here. 

Tomatoes growing under row cover to keep them warm!

Lettuce seedlings waiting in the truck before being transplanted out into the field.  Lettuce is one of the crops that we plant in "successions" so that we have them available to harvest for you throughout the season.  We seed them in the greenhouse and then transplant them out into the field about every 3 weeks.

"Hairy Vetch" - Funny name, but a wonderful cover crop that fixes nitrogen in our fields when we don't have any planted crops growing.  Nitrogen is fertilizer for the crops we'll be planting into this same field later in the season.  It's pretty too!

Buddy, Eddy & Mario transplanting scallions in field 3.  Today we were transplanting basil, scallions, cabbages and lettuce. 

This is what the transplanter looks like from below.  The machine places the scallion plants into the soil and covers them up.  Someone usually walks behind to make sure that everything looks good.