First tomatoes planted in the ground

Almost a week of sunny weather after the rain last Tuesday was exactly what we needed.

It helped the soil dry out enough that we were able to use the tractor to prepare it for all the transplanting and direct seeding we needed to do.

The main crop we wanted to get into the ground were our tomatoes and we succeed in planting around 700 plants. It is the first of four planting of tomatoes we are doing this year.

Monday morning the temperatures were around freezing but it warmed up throughout the day and the forecast shows it isn’t very likely there will be a freeze so we were comfortable planting the tomatoes.

It is the first summer crop that we have transplanted out into the field which is very exciting and makes us look forward to when they are ready to harvest.

Tomatoes were not the only crop we transplanted Monday. We also transplanted lettuce, parsley, broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage.

Around 3,500 transplants went into the ground Monday and for most of our spring crops it was our last planting. We still have a little more lettuce and a few other things but not that much.

We even seeded some more lettuce in the greenhouse Monday along with our second planting of peppers.

In addition to the transplanting we were able to get a good amount of direct seeding done. With all the rain we had been unable to direct seed anything for a few weeks so we needed to do it.

We seeded the last beets of the spring as they take around 50 days to be ready to harvest which would put them being in the middle of May.

Spinach, bok choy, radishes, arugula and turnips were also direct seeded so we can hopefully have a consistent supply of those crops through May.

The other summer crop that went into the field Monday was beans. We seeded our first planting of green beans which actually was supposed to happen last week but of course we couldn’t get in with the wet soil.

This is the first of two varieties of green beans we are growing and we chose it because it does better earlier in the season when the soil is a little bit cooler.

While all the transplants and direct seeding changed how the farm looked a lot, we also were able to get a lot of weeding doing including of garlic which made that crop look so much better with most of the weeded destroyed.

The weather is still a little cooler than we expected with the calendar turning to April in just a few days. That has caused all of our crops we have planted this spring to be growing a little bit slower than expected but they soon will explode with grow.