Enjoying the rain & fall crops

We got rain!!

Even though it was forecasted to rain we didn’t believe with certainty it was going to happen until it started and we were not sure how much since there was so much variation in how much was predicted.

Over the course of Sunday and Monday we received 0.6 inches of rain on the farm as the storm was to the east of us with some places receiving three inches or more.

We were very grateful to get the rain as the plants, especially the fall crops, love the rain and grow really well after the fact. There is just something about rain that the crops love that irrigation cannot replicate. The lettuce and broccoli we planted last week right after it started to cool down are growing well and will continue to do so with sunny days forecasted.

Combined with the rain and the sunny weather starting tomorrow all the crops will be growing rapidly even the weeds. Cultivating those weeds before they grow much more will be a focus of this week as we are able to do more work in the field

Saturday afternoon after we got back to the farm from the farmers market we planted some sugar snap peas ahead of the potential rain so that we would not have to irrigate them until after they germinated.

Our greenhouse is getting more full every week with some plants ready to get transplanted this coming week and others that are a little further off like our onions. There are a lot of the same crops in the greenhouse as we have multiple plantings of lettuce and broccoli among other things that were seeded at different times so we can have successions in the field when its time to harvest them instead of them being all ready at the same time.

Bunching greens enjoy the winter and we hope to have a continuous supply of greens all winter long so we have second and third successions of chard and multiple varieties of kales to fulfill that.

Last week we harvest our first chard and lettuce of the fall and this week we will start harvest our dino and red russian kale. Our third kale, a green curly variety, is about a week behind so we will have a nice diversity of greens once that is ready along with collards.

Some of the crops that we direct seeded in mid-August are getting close to being ready with radishes and turnips sizing up while bok choy is a little bit further behind.