THE BUSY SEASON ON THE FARM FROM TREVOR....
This time of the year can be overwhelming on the farm. There seems to be an endless amount of weeds to pull, produce to harvest each day, seeds to start in the greenhouse and plants to transplant outside.
We are just now finishing harvesting some of our first crops - lettuce, kale, broccoli, and beets. We will then rush to get the next crops in for a second harvest. Next up, we'll be planting spaghetti squash, lettuce, chard, beets and carrots and beans.
The bush beans that we'll be planting are a fancier green bean variety called 'Cosmos', which is a nice, slender bean. Beans sprout quickly from direct seeding in the soil, and the bean plant itself helps add nitrogen back to the soil. As an organic grower, nitrogen is the most difficult element for us to get to the plants. We can't use urea or ammoniacal nitrogen fertilizers, which are both are conventional synthetic fertilizers that have readily available nitrogen for rapid vegetative growth on plants. Instead, we have to have these nitrogen-fixing legumes as well as compost additions for slow-releasing nitrogen to come back to our soil.
Today we'll be working up the soil. That means tilling in any cover crops, such as the rye grass that we plant between rows to suppress weeds, and spreading additional dry minerals, such as gypsum, for calcium. By the end of the week we'll form raised beds and neatly drape them in a thin layer of plastic mulch to control moisture and weeds.
