In our break from writing a weekly newsletter, three months have now gone by on the farm. Though our harvest period is seasonal, the work does not stop on the farm when we aren’t at the market. During the summer, without crops to harvest, farming is a little different. We spend a great deal of time carefully planning the harvest season ahead of us – filling our array of spreadsheets, completing seed and supply inventory and orders, sifting through records from seasons-prior to inform decisions for the next 12 months and beyond, participating in our yearly organic certification audit and inspection of the farm and its facilities, among other things.
And when the weather is fine, we are maintaining a growing fleet of equipment, building new farm tools, improving existing systems and infrastructure for the season ahead. And before we know it, we are seeding new crops, prepping new ground, and tucking the first plants into the soil. Many months of careful planning begin to take on their physical form on the land. Our environment begins to fill up with green.
As we gear up to the harvest season, we anticipate the arrival of bountiful crops in October. We thought we would take this opportunity to share some photos from the summer, and views of what is to come from the fields. The long-awaited return of local, organic vegetables is near!
We look forward to seeing everyone soon!
All the best, Ellen & Cole
Planting sweet potatoes at the beginning of the summerSunn hemp cover crop growing early in the summer.Checking in on the sweet potato roots. We will begin harvesting and curing these in the next couple of weeks to be ready for the first markets of fall.Making a last-minute replacement of our propagation greenhouse roof before the season really ramps up.A normal day in the greenhouse over the summer…. 109 degrees. Coreopsis seed saved from last season is all cleaned and ready to sow in a few weeks (it will bloom in the springtime). We save the seed of many of our flower varieties in order to select for unique colors and forms that you can’t find anywhere else.Full-grown cover crop laid flat after a thunderstormUs! Checking out the first rows planted for the season. Everything is growing very well and we anticipate a bountiful beginning to the harvest season in October. Time flies.Another type of cover crop – this is a mixture of buckwheat and cowpeas. The buckwheat is the plant with the white flowers. Pollinator’s love it.A neighbor excavated this rock for us from our driveway this summer. What we thought was only a small bump in the road ended up being the largest rock we’ve ever unearthed on the farm. In this position, the rock stands 7 feet tall. We are installing it as a monument on the farm.Florida summer storm passing over us a few weeks ago. We saw over 10 inches of rain on the farm in one week.Roselle hibiscus growing strong. This photo is about a month old – the plants have about doubled in size now. We will have a lot of hibiscus calyxes to harvest in October.Sweet potatoes all grown up.One of our high tunnels full of sunn hemp. Tomatoes will be planted in here during the wintertime.Rainbow over the summer fields.Many trays of zinnias ready to plant.Leveling a field ahead of planting.We made some adjustments to our tunnel end-walls this summer. In this photo you can see sunn hemp cover crop just beginning to sprout inside.
