Early June Greenhouse Activity

Lettuce, ready to find a home in the great outdoors! Getting so big in the greenhouse it is a chore to get water to the roots...the umbrella of the plant can often be obtrusive when trying to water, additionally, the roots begin to dominate the soils capacity to absorb water and the plants dry out much faster. These flats of lettuce are on their way out, following recently transplanted flats of celery and, of course, the hundreds of chiles an tomatoes plated out earlier this spring.




Cabbage? I didn't even check...if not cabbage, broccoli. This stuff comes in waves throughout the farm as Lee and Wayne try to always keep it available as staple crops. In fact, this is what we were sowing again this week. The stuff we seeded this week will be the fall harvest and some of it will go into winter, for example the brussels sprouts. Other crops seeded this week include another succession of lettuces, cauliflower, cabbage (lots of sauerkraut to come!), broccoli, romanescos, etc...All of that sea-green stuff. All of this is done according to the moon phase and we were in a hurry this week to get seeds into soil while the timing was right.

An overview of celery to plant out in coming weeks. The Thanksgiving crop? Perhaps. Planted too early the celery will flower as it is a biennial and reacts to temperatures that are too low. Planted too late it will never mature prior to fall/winter frosts. We have a good time trying to get the perfect celery specimen to harvest each season. It is one of my personal favorite growing experiments. Not to mention the tiny seed size. It is a challenge to drop just one seed per cell, one must focus very hard or else thin later on which can prove to be a lot of extra work.



Number one all around assistant Dominique and her side kick, Marisol, work hard to drop seeds in soil, organize flats, follow instructions from Lee, brew soil to fill flats, water greenhouse during high afternoon temperatures, etc.... This is a nice shift from the farm stand, the CSA, the commercial kitchen and all the other places Dominique had divided her energy for the farm these days....not to mention she is trying to invest time and energy into her own farming adventures this season! If there is one thing for certain, farming offers way too much work all the time. If you could do ten things at once, you might be able to get to it all...