We have another fun filled veggie week in store for our members.  The squash, beans, and cucumbers are starting to come in faster than we can pick them.  We have harvested 13,800 lbs of produce so far this year.   That is far beyond what we have ever done before!  We are excited about what the rest of the year has in store.  We've started picking a few tomatoes lately and they should be in your share very soon! 

 

Yesterday marked a significant turning point on the farm.  I tilled in the used cabbage, collards, and other brassica beds.  I sowed buckwheat cover crop on all of these areas.  Buckwheat is a great summer time cover crop.  It grows quickly, even without lots of water.  It holds nutrients in place for the next crop and provides much needed organic matter when we till it in.  Buckwheat flowers attract many beneficial insects and pollinators.  Walk by our maturing buckwheat patch and you can hear it buzz! 

Some other summer cover crops we use are millet, sorghum, and sunflowers.  Each has an added benefit and is in some way different from the rest.  Millet is a great forage for our chickens and easy to incorporate.  Sorghum grows tall, stops erosion, provides lots of organic matter, but is hard to work into the soil with the bigger stalks.  Sunflowers besides being beautiful help to penetrate the subsoil and make it more permeable.   Some other cover crops we use in the fall are clover, oats, and rye. 

 

Besides putting some of the spent land into cover crops we broke ground in our new field we call 'A' in the last few weeks.  We planted 1500 sweet potatoes!!!  Quick to harvest greens and roots also made it into this field.  It is really awesome to think five years ago it was a holding area for goats and a donkey and most of it was covered in briars.  Now if all goes well it will be a productive field for us.  Besides the clearing and cover cropping it took to get it this point, we've also added much needed compost.  The field was low in phosphrous so we amended it with crab shell.  Crab shell is ground up fine and we spread it over the entire field.  It promotes chitin eating bacteria which helps us keep diseases and pest under control.  We also added some trace minerals and a natural source of nitrogen.  We sub-soiled [broke up the under layers], tilled, and then spaded.  The result was nice fluffly soil to plant into. 

 

Hope you enjoy your shares this week!