As you have likely noticed the moisture that fuels the monsoon is starting to creep in to southeastern Arizona. The cloud buildups have been visible south and east of the farm for the last week or so and there has been a teaser shower or two at the farm in the last few days. We are impatiently waiting on the monsoon rains to begin. When they start, everything will grow more quickly and the plants will be a lot happier. Lately they have been really droopy in the afternoon heat and are perked back up by the morning, only to repeat the cycle.
Yesterday we finished putting the bird netting and shade cloth over and around the blackberry bushes. We finished this task just in time because the first berries ripened this week. Of course we have eaten all of the very few ripe ones that we have seen. It looks like we should have enough for the CSA shares and maybe even for the markets within a few weeks.
We partly completed trellising the tomato plants this week. Most of the plants have many small tomatoes and more blossoms are opening every day, so it looks like we will have an abundant tomato harvest. Now we just have to wait for them to ripen; it always seems like the first ones take forever to be ready to pick. We will keep you up to date on their progress.
We started harvesting at 5a this morning and quit a little after noon. It is 102 degrees out in the field right now. I just put some additional shade over some seedlings we planted last evening. They were looking pretty wilted, but will perk up as soon as the sun gets low and the temperature moderates. Tomorrow will be even hotter !!
We are planting more herbs this summer than last. We currently have white sage, spearmint, cilantro, and sorrel growing; you may have seen these at our markets.
We just planted basil and dill. We will start seeds of thyme, parsley, oregano and summer savory this weekend.
If you have suggestions as to additional herbs that you would like to see in our farm stand at the markets or if you have a favorite variety that you think would be a good one for us to grow, please email us or tell us when you stop by at the market.
It is going to be a delicious season this round. The images show some of the tasty vegetables and fruit that you will see in your shares.
I saw the first tomato yesterday. The plants really took off growing this week. Our newest farmer-in-training, Stephen, spent some hours pruning the plants yesterday, removing the suckers below the first set of flowers and all the branches touching the ground. Now those plants are primed to grow and provide us a bounty of mouth-watering plum tomatoes. I can’t wait!
The blackberry plants are loaded with fruit, exceeding my expectations for this season. This will only be the second harvest from these brambles. Last year we picked about 35 pounds – well, we picked a lot more, but many were eaten right off the vine. Anyway, we had 35 pounds that went to the market and nearly all went to our CSA members; there just weren’t enough to sell at the market. This year it looks like we might harvest 100 pounds ! That’s a lot of cobbler, jam, ice cream sauce, fruit compote!
The potatoes, variety Colorado Rose, are growing very rapidly now. Many of them have flower buds almost ready to open. That means we will soon be able to steal a few baby new potatoes from the plants. Those baby new potatoes won’t make it to the market (we will scarf them down at the farm), but as soon as the new potatoes are ready to harvest, they will be showing up in CSA shares and at the markets.
The red cabbage is heading up – a few will make it to the market tomorrow and Wednesday.
The Rainbow Swiss chard plants have finally taken off. To my eye, this is one of the most beautiful plants we grow.
Okay, I need to get back out into the field. There is still lots to plant and a big harvest to get in before the sun goes down.
Rainbow Swiss chardRed cabbageBlackberriesThe first tomatoColorado Rose potato plants
If you didn’t notice, the last few days gave us a little taste of the heat that is coming. We hit the high 90s at the farm and that prompted us to work more quickly to implement some of our strategies to deal with the heat.
You can see a couple of those strategies in the image taken of the sweet pepper bed. Shade cloth is attached to the supports for the pepper plants and draped down on the western side. The row to the right is a greens bed with a row cover to shade and keep in some humidity. The rowcover on the bed now is AG30, that we use in the winter. It along with all the remaining rowcovers in the field will be removed this week and replaced with AG19 a very lightweight cover that lets in plenty of light, but does not trap in the heat.
The tomato plants (blooming already !!) love the warm weather, but will fry in the extreme heat that we usually experience in June, so that bed will also get a shade cloth treatment within the next few weeks.
Shade cloth will also protect the blackberry bushes that are blooming heavily now. The bees have been busy and there are already many green berries forming. We are really excited about this crop – we might harvest 100 pounds of blackberries this year!
Another heat strategy we employ has to do with lowering the temperatures of the soil to allow seeds to germinate when the ambient temperatures are very high. That we do with triple-layer germination covers made from old rowcovers. We apply these directly to the beds and topwater them twice daily (early morning and just after sunset). The evaporation of the water cools the underlying soil and the high albedo of the white germination covers reflects the daytime light and heat.
In order to keep the humans cool out here, we are shifting our operations a bit earlier every week. We will soon be starting the workday around 5a and even earlier. We’ll work until it is too hot, then retreat inside and sleep in the afternoon, arising again when the sun is low. When the sun goes down, the headlamps come out and we’ll work for a few hours at night. We will also increase shaded areas on the farm using 90% shade cloth to create more spaces where we can work out of the intense sunlight.
For a few more weeks, we will be continuing the sign-up for the late spring/summer CSA share program. We have several more slots open, so if you want to buy a share, please let us know. The program will consist of 16 weeks of deliveries to the markets starting the third week of May and continuing into September. The cost will be $250. We will have the signup forms at our farm stands and available online. Thanks!
We are still planting our summer crops; it is a bit late on some and quite late on others, but we are chugging along. The tomato plants are finally in the ground – went in last week. They survived the high winds of the last few days and look like they will be fine. The variety is Verona, a delicious plum tomato type that we have planted for a few years. They do well in the heat and are prolific producers.
This week we plan to get all the chiles and peppers into the ground, which will free up a lot of space in the hoophouse. The year we will double our planting of corno di toro Italian sweet peppers as well as the small lunchbox peppers. We also have jalapeños, and will be trying two New Mexico chile varieties – Jarales and Sinahuisa. Our poblano seeds germinated very poorly and I haven’t had time to replant, but will do so this week. So the poblanos won’t be ready until late in the season, but they will be ready in time for the chiles en nogada for Mexican Independence Day on September 16.
For two more weeks, we will be continuing the sign-up for the late spring/summer CSA share program. If you are not a CSA shareholder, please consider it. The program will consist of 16 weeks of deliveries to the markets starting the third week of May and continuing into September. The cost will be $250. We will have the signup forms at our farm stands and available online. Please let us know if you’d like to reserve a spot or if you have any friends/coworkers/neighbors who are interested. Thank you for your consideration.
The sweet potato slips arrived! They came in a box in the regular mail. I put them into a cup of water as soon as I unpacked them. As you can see in the image, they aren’t much to look at, but they will quickly start to grow once they get in the ground. Sweet potato slips are pretty tough and will grow into fine plants even when they are in rough shape. We will prepare the bed by ripping it deeply and amending with peat and sulfur to help lower the pH of the bed, along with some very well-aged goat manure. The slips then will be planted about 18in apart in a bed that is between our two red potato beds so that when the regular potatoes are harvested, the sweet potato plants can spread out and have plenty of room to grow. The plants will spread out to cover an area 8 feet on either side of the bed. Then in about 4 months we will dig the bounty! This planting should yield a thousand pounds of sweet potatoes or more if the environmental factors cooperate.
We are continuing the sign-up for the late spring/summer CSA share program. It will consist of 16 weeks of deliveries to the markets starting the third week. of May and continuing into September. The cost will be $250. We will have the signup forms at our farm stands and available online. Please let us know if you’d like to reserve a spot or if you have any friends/coworkers/neighbors who are interested.
The blackberry bushes are now blooming. We finished the trellising of the canes yesterday. A little blood was spilled due to interaction with the thorns, but that is the deal with blackberries – you have to bleed a little to get the delicious reward. The new canes are known as primacanes and the 2-year-old canes are the floracanes; these are the ones that bloom and produce the berries.
The potato plants are poking up through the soil. Soon we will be hilling them for the first time and in a couple months we will be harvesting new potatoes.
We are seeking summer helpers. If you are interested in helping on harvest days (primarily Tuesdays and Saturdays) or if you know of anyone who might be interested, please email or pass along my email. We are also looking for at least two more people to work this summer in exchange for room and board. If you know anyone who is interested, please have them contact me. Thanks!
We are continuing the sign-up for the late spring/summer CSA share program. It will consist of 16 weeks of deliveries to the markets starting the third week. of May and continuing into September. The cost will be $250. We will have the signup forms at our farm stands and available online. Please let us know if you’d like to reserve a spot or if you have any friends/coworkers/neighbors who are interested.
We harvested the entire French red shallot crop on Tuesday. Wow! I didn’t weigh it yet, but I think the weight is somewhere between 200 and 400 pounds. We have shallots drying on many makeshift horizontal surfaces, as you can see in the images. And that is only about half of them; the loft of the Tiny House is also full of shallots as is two more temporary surfaces above what will be the living room. In 4 or 5 weeks the shallots will be cured and we will be able to reclaim those spaces and move the shallots into cold storage.
Our small hoophouse is now full of seedlings waiting to be transplanted into beds in the field. The images show some tomatoes, chiles and peppers.
This week we will continue the sign-up for the late spring/summer CSA. It will consist of 16 weeks of deliveries to the markets starting the third week. of May and continuing into September. The cost will be $250. We will have the signup forms at our farm stands and available online. Please let us know if you’d like to reserve a spot.
We had some rain last night! The first measureable precipitation in a while – 0.20in. It is cool and fresh out here this morning. The creosote bushes smell lovely and are all clean and green. They started flowering about a week ago, so they are especially fragrant this morning. To steal a phrase from Gary Nabhan, the desert smells like rain this morning.
Yesterday we finally planted the potatoes, variety Colorado Rose. We put in 640 row feet. I dug the trenches by hand with a shovel yesterday afternoon as the rain was moving in; we got the seed spuds planted and covered in the failing light as it was starting to sprinkle and blow. Now we wait. In 80 days or so we should have some delicious new potatoes – nice red ones.
This week we will continue the sign-up for the late spring/summer CSA. It will consist of 16 weeks of deliveries to the markets starting the third week. of May and continuing into September. The cost will be $250. We will have the signup forms at our farm stands and available online. Please let us know if you’d like to reserve a spot.
SouthWinds Farm 