I hope all is going well for you all!
The week on the farm has been nice. Many of you are probably familiar with vegetable production, but let me shed a few ideas of what happens in providing you with vegetables for 22 weeks.
Many vegetables are planted more than once. We have 3-4 different plantings of tomatoes, 8-9 cucumber/melons plantings, 4-5 squash plantings, many plantings of lettuce. Those are the "summer vegetables" With this many plantings we can almost guarantee that you should have these throughout the summer/fall season.
Your spring and fall vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, bok choi, lettuces, radishes, turnips, swiss chard, onions, etc) are started in the greenhouse about 6-8 weeks before they go into the ground and once they are in the ground they take 30-90 days to be ready to be eaten. Some things are quick like radishes, others take a long time like some varieties of cabbage.
We also try to plant several varieties of the same crop that mature within a week or two of each other. Most vegetables have a short window of peak ripeness and then quickly decline in quality. Cabbage and broccoli have about a 1-2 week window of when they are harvest able. So we plant 2-5 varieties that mature at different times. I think our earliest variety of cabbage matures on average in 50 days and the longest one takes 85 days. Now...if you get some cloudy cool weather thrown in there it throws the schedule all too pieces. When that happens you hopefully have enough of something else going well to provide you all with a full basket.
Ok, Enough for now. Sometimes some of you are probably surprised that I'm inside emailing you back and forth in the middle of the day. Since we're not pro's at this 22 week CSA yet, I spend a lot of time planning, researching, and praying!
Thank you all so much!
Sincerely,
Ford Waterstrat
No comments:
Post a Comment