Crop Talk: April 10, 2017

Crop Talk, April 10, 2017

Great Berries

With freeze warnings posted for Friday and Saturday nights, we had to cover the strawberries again last weekend. It didn't get quite as cold as predicted, but better safe that sorry. And we weren't sorry! We took the blankets off Sunday morning, and the berries looked great.

We have twelve rows of Sweet Charley berries, which ripen a little earlier than Chandler berries in the rest of the field. If the weather stays warm, and we don't get too much rain, we may see the first red gems in the middle of May.

For the next few weeks, we'll be open every day from 10:00 to 5:00, except April 16, when we'll be closed for Easter. Wagon rides will run at 11:00, 1:00, and 3:00 every day, with the cow train going out at 12:24 and 2:45.

Roosteraunt schedule: 11:00 to 3:00 every day except Monday.

Remember that membership cards will be waiting for you in the market on your first visit.

Field Notes

We planted 10,000 onions over the weekend. They join their hardy cousin in the allium family, garlic, which has been in the field for two or three weeks. We've also moved some chard from the greenhouse into the field.

Those are cherry tomatoes in the picture to the right. They'll stay in the greenhouse until we're sure they won't freeze.

Come and get 'em!

If your family has adopted chicks this year, they will be available from April 7 through April 15. Please come for them between 10:00 and 4:00.

Information about chick-keeping is available on our website.

Finding Faith on the Farm

By Jeff Chu on March 31, 2017. From Modern Farmer. Photography by Lindsay Clark

Once, my people were subsistence farmers. Like much of the Chinese diaspora, I grew up knowing the name of my ancestral village in Guangdong Province: Chek Lai (roughly “brown dirt”) in the county of Fa Yuen (“flower area”). A century ago, Baptist missionaries from America arrived and converted a young man named Wing Hong Chu. After the Communists won control of China, Wing Hong escaped and immigrated to the United States. He became a pastor and, eventually, my grandfather.

I’ve never been to Chek Lai. I’ve lost my agrarian heritage. What remains are roots searching for purchase in a foreign land—a thing I didn’t understand until September of last year, when I enrolled in graduate school at Princeton Theological Seminary and registered for Ecologies of Faith Formation, a class at the Farminary.