Cold mornings & sunny days on the farm

Brisk mornings have been the routine over the last week followed by the sun coming out and shining brightly warming up the days.

With the sun out shining there feels like a different energy on the farm from the cloudy and rainy late December that was best spent with a hot drink in front of a fireplace.

The soil still has all of the moisture in it from the rains over the holidays which the plants are drinking up while the plant leafs are photosynthesizing much more with the sun.

There is visible amount of growth on all the plants after it felt like they stopped their growing during the cloudy December.

Most enjoying the sunny weather is the broccolini which is producing a lot more stems than it was in December due to the sun and slightly warmer days as a result.

Broccolini is super delicious and its tender stems are a great addition stir fried or roasted to any meal with olive oil drizzled over it.

The cauliflower and broccoli are slowing down because we have harvested a large majority of what we planted already. The broccoli does produce side shoots which are much different than broccolini, mainly larger florets and a tougher stem.

The chard, kale and collards are starting to show more and more new leafs with the sun and longer days.

All that we seeded on the first of January has germinated and is growing well. The sunny weather has helped the greenhouse be warmer during the day and the seedlings are growing stockier since they don’t have to stretch to find the sunlight.

We seeded a second round of lettuce, bok choy and cabbage in the greenhouse on Monday. Those will be a little bit behind what we seeded at the start of the year but when it comes times to harvest them it should help us have a more consistent harvest over the spring.

Hopefully these first few spring transplanted lettuce overlap with what we planted in the fall that is starting to pick up its growth with the sun and longer days. Ideally they would overlap but its all up to the weather we have this spring.

For many of the veggies we will have a little bit of a gap coming up soon where we have finished harvesting everything we planted in the fall and what we are seeding now still has another month before we transplant it and then some time to grow in the field.

Some of the brassicas we are limiting what we plant so we can rotate the crops in a way that doesn’t bring in any pests or diseases. We are working on a couple of things for next winter that could increase the amount of those crops we grow.

One of the main tasks for the start of the new year has been pruning the trees and we are making good progress on them.

It always takes a little bit of time to get back into the rhythm as the last time we pruned was a year ago but we have been taking notes over the course of the year about how we want to prune the trees.

With the fruit trees we are wanting to prune them so they are shorter and we can grab the fruit off the trees as we walk by without using a ladder. There is not much better than a ripe peach on a warm summer day.

Pruning the olive trees to reduce their height a little bit we have seen at the very top of some branches a handful of olives that were too high for us to harvest.