Springing into a busier time on the farm

The work on the farm is getting more every day by leaps and bounds now that we are in April and having some great spring weather.

From seeding, planting, weeding, watering, harvesting, spreading compost and doing field work with the tractor there is a bevy of tasks to be accomplished every day.

As the seedlings grow much faster in the greenhouse we have to be ahead on the field preparation with the tractor so that we have the space to plant the plants and stay on the succession plan for direct sown crops.

Last Wednesday we planted our second round of tomatoes, lots more lettuce and the peppers. We followed that by planting the eggplant and basil on Thursday.

On Monday we direct seeded green beans, okra, melons and summer squash in the field while seeding our fourth succession of tomatoes in the greenhouse.

Fortunately we don’t have to keep track in our mind of when we are seeding in the field and greenhouse as we have a crop plan we created when it was calmer in the winter that made those decisions for us.

All those recently planted crops need more water at the beginning of their time in the field as they are a little stressed so keeping an eye on them takes more time with the warmer weather we are having.

Last week we started to harvest some of our first direct seeded crops of the spring and we are also seeing lots more of the later successions and other crops germinate.

The potatoes sprouted a couple of weeks ago and are now growing rapidly so we hilled them to move more soil from the pathways up against and on top of the plants to allow for more space for the potatoes to grow deeper in the soil.

With water and the warm weather we are having it will be here before we know it when we begin to harvest the first new potatoes.

The first tomatoes we planted are almost reaching the row cover which means we will have to take it off and trellis the tomatoes.

Fortunately, the daily low temperature is much warmer than a couple of weeks ago so the tomatoes can handle it although they do enjoy the boost the row cover gives them.

While we have been planting lots of summer veggies the last two weeks that have been getting our attention, the spring crops we planted in February and March are growing really well.

Many of them have showed lots of growth in the last few weeks and we have been weeding them to help reduce the competition for the water and nutrients.

The weeds will come back but hopefully fewer and for some of the crops they are growing much bigger and will shade out the soil preventing the weeds from getting the sunshine they need to grow.