Beautiful heads of leaf lettuces; the deer love them and I am sure that you will too!

The bit of warm weather really gave the spring crops a boost and the subsequent drop in temperatures didn’t faze them, but it kept us scrambling to cover the tender, warm season crops; tomatoes, cantaloupes, cucumbers and summer squash.  A new threat emerged when the deer found our beautiful butterhead lettuces and wiped out one planting in one evening.  We covered the remainder of the planting with snow fencing and we will have some spectacular heads of leaf lettuce for our Farm Share subscribers and also to go with strawberries at our Tilton farm stand.  We have 8 plantings of sweet corn planted and our next 4 plantings will include organic fields, which means chicken litter compost, cultivation for weed control and dosing the silks on each ear with vegetable oil and an organic pesticide.  We are just starting to seed 75 varieties of pumpkin and winter squash in flats, which requires considerable planning and tracking, from trays to the field.

 

Photo 1:  Our third farm share offering.

Photo 2:  Early tomatoes and cantaloupe (gamblelopes) under low tunnels.

Photo 3:  Some of our CSA beds.

Photo 4:  Snow fence for deer protection.

Photo 5:  Heads of leaf lettuce.

Photo 6:  Jason spreading organic fertilizer on sweet corn fields.

Photo 7:  Debbie and Norma preparing for pumpkin and winter squash seeding.

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First tomatoes set! Looks like an early season! Maneuvring around warm and dry, then wet, then cold weather.

Well it looks like two weeks have slipped by without a peep from me.  Pushing the season on a number of crops, much earlier than usual has kept us busy.  The early dry weather was a help in getting crops in early.  The wet weather in the beginning of May made it more difficult to get crops into the field and more difficult to get into town, but it did offer the benefit of some nice big mushrooms along with some giant overwintered spinach in the cold frame.  Our Farm Share (CSA) items were slow in coming on but we had our first offering last week.  We have managed to get 4 ½  acres of sweet corn, ½ acre of tomatoes,  ¼ acre of onions, ¼ acre of cantaloupes (gambleloupes) and 1/8  acre of potatoes planted but the current cold snap had us covering many of them up.  The spring crops in our Farm Share plantings really took off this past week.

 

Legend 1:  Our first week’s Farm Share

Legend 2:  Flooded shortcut to town

Legend 3:  Patsy with morels and overwintered spinach

Legend 4:  Farm Share beds in early May

Legend 5:  Our second week’s Farm Share

Legend 6:  Patsy and Norma transplanting tomatoes

Legend 7:  Fields being prepared for our first main season cantaloupe planting

Legend 8:  Early tomatoes and cantaloupes covered during cold weather

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