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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An Early Start to the 2011 Season with Spring Crops, Sweet Corn and Tomatoes

Welcome to the 2011 season blog “from our fields to your table” at Steffen Farms.  Last year, our digital camera quit working in the heart of the season, and unfortunately I dropped the ball on our blog. We have a new camera and I plan to enter several photos and brief commentary each week to document our 2011 season.

 

To start, I would like to show you our field for next year’s vegetable production.  Wheat was planted in the fall and then oversown with clover this spring.  When the wheat is harvested this summer, the clover will start growing, provide the winter cover crop and then supply nitrogen for next year’s vegetable crops.  On March 30, we planted our first bed of spring crops for our small Farm Share (CSA) group.  We hit an early, warm and dry window to get in our first sweet corn planting on April 8.  On April 18, we transplanted our first tomatoes in the ground, under high and low tunnel covers.

 

Legend 1: Wheat on next year’s vegetable field

 

Legend 2:  First Farm Share planting of spring crops in low tunnel

 

Legend 3: First planting of sweet corn

 

Legend 4:  First tomatoes in low tunnel

 

Legend 5:  First tomatoes in high tunnel

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Cooperation between farmers/growers, with cooperative extension and with our customers help make it possible.

When we lost 2 acres of cantaloupes to cold weather this spring, we were given a hand by the Horal family at Melon Acres.  They had extra transplants of one of the varieties we grow allowing us to not lose too much of our early crop window.  We also saw some evidence of disease in our melon transplants and it was nice to go online and get diagnostic photos of diseased plants, from Purdue and other state extension services.  Thankfully, it was a minor, noncontagious disease. And finally, it is nice to have the patience and input from our small subscriber group as we work through issues of communication and logistics.  On the crop front, the zucchini and patty pan squash are really beginning to come on, along with cucumbers, broccoli, pea pods, beets and radishes, with a taste of cilantro and basil and there should be new potatoes for our subscribers this weekend.  

Caption 1:  Cantaloupe and watermelon field, with cantaloupes in foreground.

Caption 2:  Patsy, Norma and Danielle transplanting fourth tomato planting.

Caption 3:  Our second tomato planting, formerly low tunnel tomatoes.

Caption 4: Fifth week's CSA produce.     

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Social weekend and harvesting of beets, carrots, pea pods, zucchini, chard, greens, lettuces, and kohlrabi.

I am running a bit behind on this blog and I will be talking about the weekend and week before the Memorial Day weekend.  I will have another entry in a couple days for Memorial Day weekend and the following week. On Friday, May 21 we got up early drove to St. Louis for our daughter Faith’s graduation, helped load her belongings into 4 vehicles and drove back Friday evening.  Patsy and I got up early on Saturday to get the CSA produce picked and boxed.  We spent the rest of the day getting ready for a family gathering for Faith on Sunday.  Ben and his girlfriend Ari were in from California and Adam was in from St. Louis. This kind of weekend probably won’t be possible again until after Labor Day.  On Monday, we replanted part of the 2 acres of cantaloupes that were wiped out by the unexpected cold snap.  We also planted about 4 acres of watermelons and another ½ acre of tomatoes.  The high tunnel tomatoes are setting on nice fruits and the potatoes are getting ready to flower.  Broccoli is a couple weeks off and the first five or so plantings of sweet corn are up.  The strawberries from Bland’s Farm are some of the best I have had.

 

First caption:  Faith, Ken and Patsy.

Second caption:  Ben, Adam and Patsy catching red bellied daces for Patsy’s aquarium.

Third caption:  High tunnel tomatoes and cucumbers.

Fourth caption:  Early tomatoes and broccoli that were under low tunnels in the spring.

Fifth caption:  Fourth week’s full CSA offering.

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Hard to focus: Temperature swings keeping us guessing.

I have had a hard time focusing on the theme for this week’s blog.  The 80+ degree weather the third week of April and now the upper 50’s to lower 60’s the third week of May have had us making drastic changes in our plan for the season. I guess that is my excuse for being nine days late.  The early warm weather convinced us to stop planting cool season crops in the high tunnel, switch from green plastic mulch (warmer) to black plastic mulch (cooler) in the field and now the swing back to cooler than normal weather is stressing the first planting of cantaloupes and we will have to do some replanting.  Oh well, warm weather is just around the corner, so we will focus on sunnier things.  We had a nice time at our farms with a number of our subscribers and employees this past Sunday afternoon and in spite of the chill we enjoyed fresh strawberries and ice cream.  Our warm season crops are progressing nicely in the high tunnel. We have been enjoying our greater involvement with Danville Gardens (nice people). We are getting ready to transplant more plants with the prospect of warm weather in the forecast.  And finally, we are exercising our farmers optimism that the perfect season is just around the corner. 

 

 

First caption:  Crops in our high tunnel.

Second caption:  Danville Gardens’ display has sure spruced up our stand for this time of year.

Third caption:  Cantaloupe transplants ready for the field.

Fourth caption:  Rainbow over our transplanter.

Fifth caption:  Our third week’s full CSA offering.  Wasn’t organized enough to get photos of the first two weeks.

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The juggling has begun: seeding, transplanting, cultivating, fertilizing, irrigation, spraying, marketing, payroll.

We are getting into that phase of the season where nearly everything is going on.  We are marketing strawberries at our Tilton stand, we are cultivating potatoes and plastic mulched tomatoes, we are spraying herbicide on sweet corn ground and planting sweet corn every three days, we are transplanting cantaloupes, watermelons and more tomatoes, we are seeding more watermelons, we are harvesting spring crops for the CSA, we are fertilizing and laying plastic mulched beds, managing workers and doing payroll, we are repairing equipment and laying irrigation supply lines. This will reach a crescendo in July and continue through August when we are doing daily harvests of sweet corn, watermelon, cantaloupes, tomatoe and many other crops.

 

I have include some photos of equipment this week for you ‘grease under the fingernails’ crowd.

 

First Caption:  Rototilling down our cover crop after mowing.  Our 7’ rototiller.

 

Second Caption: Getting ready to plant sweet corn with our 5 row planter.

 

Third Caption:  Jason helping to lay plastic mulch beds for cantaloupe.  Jason is checking the distance between beds. 

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