The sun is making think about summer

We haven’t reached the end of January but we are already seeding our first summer crops of 2023.

On Monday we seeded our first planting of tomatoes in the greenhouse which will be followed by a few more seedings over the next two months. It is a smaller planting than our main one but it includes cherry tomatoes, heirlooms and slicers.

Those tomatoes will be in the greenhouse for around two months before we plant them in the field.

Most of our spring crops that we are seeding over the next few weeks will be transplanted before those tomatoes are ready to go into the field.

It wasn’t just summer crops that we seeded this week as we also started some broccoli and cabbage. It is great to see our first plantings of those crops germinate and start to grow.

Everything will be starting to grow more fast over the coming weeks as we just crossed over 10 hours of daylight along with the combination of lots of rain for the plants and the current sunshine.

Since the rain has stopped we have been really busy weeding all of our crops. The onions pictured above were one of the priorities as they do not grow as well when they are weedy.

Most crops do not grow as well when they are weedy since weeds compete with them for nutrients and water so the crop is putting energy into fighting off the weeds instead of growing.

We still have lots of lettuce in the greenhouse that we have been waiting to transplant until the soil dries up a little bit. We are hopeful that we are able to get those seedlings into the field in the next few days as they are begging us to be planted.

Once those are in the ground it will open up a lot of space in our greenhouse that we will promptly fill with all the onions, shallots, leeks, eggplant and lettuce we are transplanting next week.

It is a busy time and will continue to be busy!!