June Transition

This is surely some perfect weather. Low humidity, cool nights, plenty of sunshine, warm but not hot days, sandwiched between decent rain events. This is ideal weather for ripening strawberries. It also helps us farmers grind through the last week or so of peak crop planting. It feels endless, this time of infinite sowing, but we're soon rounding a corner into maintenance of long season crops and eventual harvest of those crops. We'll still plant some crops weekly, like lettuce, cilantro, dill, and beans, and have a lot of crops to plant for late summer and fall harvest, but soon the bulk of transplanting will be behind us.

Last week 3,000+ feet of sweet potatoes were planted, as well as zucchini, cucumbers, lettuce, basil, cilantro, dill, beans, edamame, chard, and cantaloupe. This coming week the 2nd round of tomatoes goes in, as well as 1000 feet of leeks, which more or less marks the end of the big spring planting time. At the end of June or early July we'll transplant the 2023 strawberry patch plants, begin sowing seeds for fall crops, and begin thinking about establishing season-ending cover crops, starting another phase of the growing season.

Last week we began installing trellising on the u-pick cherry tomatoes. One hundred 7-foot metal posts were pounded, wire was strung, and tomato plants were pruned and clipped to the wire. As the plants grow for the next couple of months additional levels of wire will be added and plants will be secured and kept elevated off the ground (for ease of harvest and disease suppression). Next in line are the tunnel tomatoes which desperately need to be pruned. Twine will be suspended from the tunnel rafters for the vines to be anchored to. Soon the 3000 feet of sweet and hot peppers will need to be staked and held up with twine. Eight thousand feet of potatoes were hilled and cultivated last week. We'll try to do this one more time before the plants get too big for us to safely drive the tractor over. We'll begin harvesting these potatoes in August.