Bursting with color & veggies on the farm

The field space on the farm where we don’t have something planted has been greatly reducing the last few weeks and been replaced with beautiful spring veggies and rapidly growing summer crops.

We have begun harvesting the spring planted lettuce with lots more ready shortly thanks to our succession plantings we have done along with our new broccolini coming in.

Every week we are planting more melons along with a big planting of some crop most weeks. Today we are planting onions and leeks while last week we planted another succession of tomatoes.

In another month we will have almost all of our summer crops planted and still harvesting the spring veggies for a little longer before they get mowed down.

We have been picking some garlic that we planted back in October to bring to market as green garlic for the last two months and in another month we will be harvesting it dried garlic. The plants are starting to bulb up and after they have done that we will harvest and dry them before bringing to market.

If you can’t wait until Saturday for more fresh veggies, stop by the Wednesday Davis Farmers Market from 3-6 pm today. Picnic in the Park will start May 7 with the hours of the market moving to 4-8 pm.

Starting today we will have a few beets at market with lots more to come in the next few weeks.

We have begun to stake the tomatoes and every week we are adding another string to keep the plants upright which helps the plants and us. If the tomatoes were touching the ground they would go rotten pretty quickly and harvesting tomatoes from plants laying on the ground is painstakingly slow to pick up the plant and look all around it for the ripe ones.

By staking it does add some more time every week as we have to make sure the tomatoes get another string on them or with how fast they grow they will cause a mess in a blink of the eye, especially with how many tomatoes we have planted.

There are even some small sungolds and early girls on the plants which is exciting to go with the basil that is growing very well and the eggplant, peppers and summer squash.

Along with the crops growing rapidly, the weeds have been exploding in growth. We have been weeding everything as quickly as we can so that the weeds don’t slow down the crops and take the nutrients from them.

Despite trying to stay ahead of the weeding, it is virtually impossible at this time of the year with how everything growing. Thus we are prioritizing weeding certain crops first that are more importantly and letting the weeds grow on some successions where we are starting or about to start harvesting since it will be done in a few weeks.

With the warmer temperatures and sunny weather all the veggies are needing more water so we are irrigating them more to prevent them from getting stressed and bolting. Once they bolt there is no way to save them as the flavor goes bad as the plant focuses on producing seeds.