Staking tomatoes & thriving lettuce
Every year the weather is different and the tomato plants get planted at different times but one constant is that in mid-March we start putting in the stakes to trellis the tomatoes.
It is an exciting step and means that we are a little bit closer to harvesting the first tomatoes of the season sometime in late-May.
About every seven plants we pound in a t-post and then we tie some string tightly on both sides of the plants to encourage the tomatoes to grow upwards instead of sideways.
By using the string to guide the plants more vertical it saves it lots of time when harvesting by making it easier to see and pick the ripe tomatoes. Additionally, keeping the tomatoes off the ground prevents them from going bad.
As the plants continue to grow we will add more lines of string to keep guiding them and by the time we start harvesting each row will look like a hedgerow of tomato greenery with ripe tomatoes visible hanging down.
Before we started putting in the stakes we hand weeded right around the tomato plants to give them less competition as they begin to grow furiously with the longer sunny days.
On some of the cherry tomatoes we are seeing a handful of flowers and even the first few tiny green tomatoes. It still will be a while until we can begin to harvest but it is on the horizon.
While the first tomatoes are being staked and trellised, next week we are planting our third succession in the field while we have seeded the fourth round of tomatoes in the greenhouse.
It is a lot of tomatoes and we are excited about the varieties we are adding to what we have grown the last four years.
Over the weekend there was 1 1/8 inches of rain on the farm which was a great to see and means that we don’t have to irrigate anything for a few days.
The soil moisture is much improved and in the perfect spot to transplant peppers and eggplant in the field today.
There may be a few more weeds as the rain will help all the weed seeds germinate but it will also be really beneficial to reduce the transplant shock for the peppers and eggplant by having water there for the roots to immediately start using.
The pepper and eggplant transplants look healthier and stronger this year which is likely due to the warm March that helped them grow faster even though we had the shade cloth on the greenhouse.
It kept the sun off the plants and reduced the ambient temperature slightly but it still stayed warmer than usual because of the nights being in the low 50s. The plants are happier with the warmer weather and hopefully will grow quickly after being planted.
Last week we started harvesting the spring-planted lettuce and they are looking so great with the sunny days.
The red butter and red leaf lettuces are sizing up and creating large heads of delicious.
When we plant the lettuce area it is a patchwork of varieties that we plant every week so we are able to see the different stages one variety is at depending on when it gets planted.
Some of the green little gems have been garnering the attention of the birds who are eating the tops of them so we got some bird netting to keep them off the lettuce. There are so many bugs and other plants that we don’t harvest around the farm for the birds to eat.
Luckily they seen to have been mostly ignoring the red and bronze little gems so those are the ones we mainly will have for now. The red variety is a little more crunchy while the bronze little gem has more of a butteriness to it.
Both of them are perfect to toss in a salad with their small leaves and together they bring that great combo of crunchiness and butteriness. Only need to add a little bit of our extra virgin olive oil to complete the delicious salad.
