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Published On: Sep 08, 2007 11:32 PM
Total entries in this category:
Published On: Sep 08, 2007 11:32 PM
Planting Notes
Our season isn't over yet - we have another month
of slowly ripening tomatoes from a late all-heirloom planting, lettuce, arugala,
kale, radishes, and the carrots and beets which will be racing to beat the first
frost. Any green tomatoes will go into salsa verde, which we eat a LOT of around
here. :) I used to grow tomatillos, but we like it just as much made with unripe
tomatoes, so now I just wait till the first frost. I harvested some beautiful
large slicing tomatoes today - our favorite of this batch is a large orange/red
variety...of course we'll never remember what it was called, but we'll save the
seeds for next year. :)
Next year we are going to experiment with using landscape fabric or black paper mulch with our transplants. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, cabbages, kale, and swiss chard will all be planted that way, which will hopefully allow us to focus our weeding efforts on keeping our mesclun and other direct seeded crops weed free.
We'll be getting more serious about our early and/or fall onions in the hopes of a good storage crop, at least enough for our own use, and plant a ton more scallions - they fly when we bring them to market. Same goes for leeks - a LOT more leeks. They grow well from seed here, and there's no reason not to grow more of them. Hardneck garlic from NorthSlope farm will go in soon, we just need to decide where to plant it.
Mesclun mix is one of our best sellers, so we'll be expanding that, including a large spring planting of arugala.I'll also be starting my nasturtiums in early spring this year - they don't bloom for us in the hot months, and they got off to a late start this year.
We've grown plenty of tomatoes this year, and our pantry is stocked, but we realized at market the common varieties just don't sell through mid-summer. We'll focus on three very eye-catching heirlooms in color and shape - I'm thinking one highly lobed red one, Purple Krims, and one with lots of red and yellow/orange streaks. Hopefully they will catch people's attention and our tomato sales will go up. We'll be growing sweet million cherries, a variety of grape tomatoes that our neighbor has developed over the years, and yellow pears. That will give a nice colorful mix of super early tomatoes. We'll have romas in too, but may not bring them to market as they don't sell well. Our peppers and eggplant suffered from weed competition but the mulch plans for next year should help with that, and we had some nice purple bells, sweet bananas, and asian eggplants.
Early spring root crops will be increased, as we didn't have enough this year. I'm going to go with french breakfast radishes - a favorite at market, a wide variety of colors of carrots, and plenty of chiogga beets. We also know now that we can never grow enough snow peas, so we'll double that planting. We prefer them to the sugar snaps, even though the sugar snaps fill out a pint basket faster.
In other farm news, the pullets we put in with the rest of the flock last night managed to pile into a corner and smother two of their kind today - chickens! Argh. I don't know why they are so petrified of the hens - they're being treated nice enough, have a heat lamp, who knows. I took half of them out for now till the rest get adjusted and start milling around like they should, then I'll slowly add in the rest of that batch. Next year we are only raising laying replacements ONCE!
Next year we are going to experiment with using landscape fabric or black paper mulch with our transplants. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, cabbages, kale, and swiss chard will all be planted that way, which will hopefully allow us to focus our weeding efforts on keeping our mesclun and other direct seeded crops weed free.
We'll be getting more serious about our early and/or fall onions in the hopes of a good storage crop, at least enough for our own use, and plant a ton more scallions - they fly when we bring them to market. Same goes for leeks - a LOT more leeks. They grow well from seed here, and there's no reason not to grow more of them. Hardneck garlic from NorthSlope farm will go in soon, we just need to decide where to plant it.
Mesclun mix is one of our best sellers, so we'll be expanding that, including a large spring planting of arugala.I'll also be starting my nasturtiums in early spring this year - they don't bloom for us in the hot months, and they got off to a late start this year.
We've grown plenty of tomatoes this year, and our pantry is stocked, but we realized at market the common varieties just don't sell through mid-summer. We'll focus on three very eye-catching heirlooms in color and shape - I'm thinking one highly lobed red one, Purple Krims, and one with lots of red and yellow/orange streaks. Hopefully they will catch people's attention and our tomato sales will go up. We'll be growing sweet million cherries, a variety of grape tomatoes that our neighbor has developed over the years, and yellow pears. That will give a nice colorful mix of super early tomatoes. We'll have romas in too, but may not bring them to market as they don't sell well. Our peppers and eggplant suffered from weed competition but the mulch plans for next year should help with that, and we had some nice purple bells, sweet bananas, and asian eggplants.
Early spring root crops will be increased, as we didn't have enough this year. I'm going to go with french breakfast radishes - a favorite at market, a wide variety of colors of carrots, and plenty of chiogga beets. We also know now that we can never grow enough snow peas, so we'll double that planting. We prefer them to the sugar snaps, even though the sugar snaps fill out a pint basket faster.
In other farm news, the pullets we put in with the rest of the flock last night managed to pile into a corner and smother two of their kind today - chickens! Argh. I don't know why they are so petrified of the hens - they're being treated nice enough, have a heat lamp, who knows. I took half of them out for now till the rest get adjusted and start milling around like they should, then I'll slowly add in the rest of that batch. Next year we are only raising laying replacements ONCE!
.
Posted: Tue - September 19, 2006 at 10:29 PM