Well, It's been a pretty full sprint here for a couple months... and it's only June! But we have some stuff to show for all the work. (like sugar snap peas that we just started picking this evening, yum!) We have to keep reminding ourselves to put down the hoe and pick up the camera to snap a few pictures. Here's a side by side, at the very least it helps ME feel like we've made some good progress. Over the past 12 or so weeks.
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| The fields in late March |
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| Same view, about June 10 |
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We've been working hard on our war against weeds. So far we're keeping mostly on top of it, though we have pulled the plug on a few beds of really grassy early salad greens. Anyway, we're on to harvesting our third and forth plantings of greens, which are really nice, and not too weedy. We'll just call plantings 1 and 2 cover crop, and turn them back into the soil. The rye grass on the farm is about four feet tall and has seed heads on it. It's really lovely, and if I get a chance I'll harvest some to dry and use in dried flower wreaths in the Fall, but seed heads are not what we want. The last thing we need is for rye to drop seed in our fields again (as it did the past 2 years... which is why we currently have rye growing in our fields to begin with). Today, after weeks of debating, arguing, procrastinating and hand wringing, we finally bought tractor mounted flail mower, phew! Once it arrives we should be able to start mowing. We weren't about to try to mow our 5 acre lower field with our little push mower. We're crossing our fingers we get the rye mowed before the seedheads fully mature.
Tomorrow we start marketing our produce in earnest. We'll be at the Plymouth Farmers Market Thursday afternoons, the Sakonnet Growers Market in Tiverton Saturday mornings. On Fridays we're launching a local farm stand in conjunction with Northstar Farm. It will be held at Northstar Farm, 1154 Main Rd in Westport, only 1 1/2 miles from our farm. The farm stand will be 2-6 on Fridays. We'll also be doing the Fairhaven Farmers Market Sunday afternoons. ... So it's a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday marathon marketing session. Somewhere in there we'll squeeze in some farm work.
