Preparing to plant summer crops

It is only March but our minds are very much thinking about summer crops and getting their area ready to be planted in.

Our first tomatoes are going to be planted Friday so we got the tractor out Monday to prep the field and will put the irrigation down today while we set the tomatoes out during the day to harden off.

We had a very light rain early Tuesday morning and hopefully will have more on Saturday. Having rain forecasted for the weekend is part of the reason we are planting tomatoes along with cabbage, broccoli and parsley Friday. The lows for each day over the next two weeks are in the 40s which is great for tomatoes since they do not like cold weather especially early on.

Another part of getting ready to plant summer crops is getting tasks done for the spring crops so that more time can be paid attention to the summer crops. One of the main tasks is weeding the field of spring crops as the weeds have been growing a lot with the warm weather and the irrigation.

The crop that needed the most weeding is the carrots as we had to do most of it by hand instead of a hoe to not accidentally kill the carrots. The picture at the top is before we weeded the carrots so it looks cleaner now.

More cabbage and spring onions were planted on Sunday as we start to see the final spring crops go into the ground. We still have some more spring crops to go into the ground but we are slowly reducing them and looking towards the summer.

Our first planting of okra was seeded in the greenhouse and we also direct seeded some parsley, dill and arugula. The arugula is already starting to germinate which is exciting.

It is exciting to see the lettuce that was the first crop we transplanted is growing well and will continue to do so with the warm weather.