Prepping for spring crops on sunny days
A new month and everything is starting to move a little quicker on the farm with all the sun and warm days we have been getting.
Everything is starting to grow slightly quicker and the longer and sunnier days allow us to do more work on the farm as we prepare for lots of planting in the coming weeks.
Many of the late fall transplanted lettuce are showing signs of growth and the new leaves on the bunching greens are growing slightly quicker than before.
We likely will be getting another cold or rainy spell as this weather is feeling like a false start to spring. It would be great to get some more rain in the next month or two.
Having only had a quarter of an inch of rain since the first week of January we have had to start irrigating our direct seeded crops with the soil drying out.
This sunny weather has been perfect for us to get a lot of tractor work done with the soil drying out a little bit. That has allowed us to get the tractor in our fields to mow some cover crop and prep the fields for planting and direct seeding.
We have a lot of spring crops and potatoes being planted so getting ahead of the tractor work is crucial in case we have rain later in the month and can’t use it then some of our fields we can still plant in.
This Saturday we will have the first of our Rio Red Grapefruit at the farmers market. On the outside part of it usually has a reddish-pink blush while the flesh has a pink flesh.
Flavor-wise they have a mix of sweetness and tartness that is delicious just eaten segmented or it can be juiced to be put in mixed drinks.
We are almost at the end of the Melogold grapefruit and then we will be moving to our second white-flesh variety, Oro Blanco. There is a couple weeks of Navel Oranges left and then the Late Lane Oranges should be ready to harvest.
Additionally the citrus trees are starting to flower for the next winter’s harvest. The flowers seem to be a few weeks earlier than last year which could cause some issues if it gets really cold but luckily where these trees are is a higher spot that rarely ever freezes.
The trees with very few fruit on them are the ones with the most flowers and hopefully they are pollinated well as only a tiny fraction of citrus flowers actually turn into a fruit.
What we are harvesting in the field is slowing down as many of our overwintered crops have been harvested through but we still have a decent amount.
We are already thinking about next winter and how we could make slight changes to increase what we have in February, March and early April which is a very challenging time on our limited fields we have water in the winter.
As the sun comes out and the days start to get longer by even just a few minutes the broccoli and cauliflower quickly start producing harvestable heads even if there are multiple plantings so we may have to try different varieties that react a little slower to have March heading brassicas.
Very shortly we will be starting to transplant in the field in addition to the direct seeding we began last week.
The sunny weather will hopefully jumpstart the brassicas we will plant and they will grow quickly if we have a sunny and warm next two months.
The seedlings are looking very good in the greenhouse which is filling up quickly with everything we have started.
Mostly we have brassicas in there but we also have two successions of tomatoes and the first plantings of eggplant and peppers. Additionally last week we seeded the onions so we have a couple tables of them which are germinating pretty well.
This winter we have been able dial in our vacuum seeder so we can seed a tray in less than a minute instead of three or four minutes by hand. It comes in very handy with the tiny seeds and the big planting of onions we just seeded.
