Crop Report

Crop notes:
We'll start with the not so good stuff first: 

Vine Crop Struggles: We have had the worst cucumber beetle attack we've seen in the last four years.  Of course, the weather is drier....  Our vine crops (summer squash, zucchini, cucumber, winter squash, melon, watermelon, pumpkin) are working to fight through them, but it is slowing them down.  We're doing what we can to handle the situation (including starting another batch of zucchini and summer squash in trays to give them the head start they need). We do NOT foresee complete crop failures, just a delay in some of the shorter season items (cukes/ssq/zuke).  Once plants grow through this stage, we think we'll be ok.

Small Timing Oops: The lettuce succession has a bit of a dry spell here - we should have some this week, but it's not as strong as we're used to.  The earlier hot weather shot one batch up early and we missed the timing on the next.  But, we're back on schedule and should be fine for lots more lettuce for as long as we can manage it.  We're hoping to break our record of 13 weeks of lettuce out 20 for a CSA season.

Oh Deer!:  Ya, the deer have found us again. We're working on excluding them.

And now for some good stuff!

Oui, We Weed:  R&T spent the entire day Sunday using the wheel hoe and rototiller doing the between row 'weeding.'  We're hitting the timing pretty well on this, but we need lots of effort on the 'in row weeding' to stay on top of it.  If there are people who might like to entertain themselves with a weeding session....

Toe the Line:  As in potato and tomato and peppers (oh, wait, that doesn't work).  Potatoes look great this year.  Two years ago we set a record with 2.5 tons of potatoes brought in.  Anyone like to see that record get broken?  It is looking like a possibility.  Tomatoes are looking to be on schedule.  We picked over 10,000 tomatoes in 2008.  2009 and 2010 were much weaker.  We like 2008 numbers better - let's go after those.  Beans look very good, peppers look good.  Onions are looking fine and the brassicae (broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, cabbage, kale, brussels, etc) are also looking very good.  We have a crop of turnips and beets coming on.  We're going to work on fall plantings of carrots.  Jeff Sage is working on the spring carrots.  All in all, I think there is more good than bad this season.  We like that.

A little more:   We've been working to get our companion flowers into our fields.  We also got 400 feet of basil in yesterday.  The plants are small, but look healthy and ready to go.  We're trying a second planting of basil (just germinating) to see how it might work.  Planting is, by no means finished.  but, it isn't really finished until October or so - so nothing abnormal there.