By now we have planted half our sweet potatoes and half our winter squash, so we have about 1/4 acre of each so far. Usually we don't plant half at a time but the sweet potato plants didn't grow at the same pace, so we are waiting for our specialty varieties to be ready. And then the soil that we prepared for the other half of the winter squash did not digest all the cover crop properly, and there were big clumpy lumps of ryegrass roots that clogged up the equipment for rolling out the plastic mulch. We decided to wait a week, let the rain help to break down the organic matter, and try again later.
We are weeding beets and carrots on both farms and they look wonderful. All the summer crops look sturdy and a lovely dark green but they are growing slowly because the cold weather keeps coming back. The tomatoes will not be early.
Scapes season is upon us -- we walk through the garlic field, pulling the tender flower stalks out of the middle of the plant, and a day later it looks like we weren't really paying attention. There are more and more. This will go on for about three weeks and then it will end abruptly and the garlic bulbs underground will start to swell into their mature shape.
This is the time of year when we get caught up with mowing and trimming, and we look ready to be in a magazine. Plants always look the most vigorous and lush before they are producing fruit -- then they start to look at a little world-weary, like parents. But the joy of vegetable farming is that nothing stays the same for more than a few weeks. We are always moving on: planting, waiting, weeding, watering, waiting, picking and moving on again. And while our bodies are working in early June, our minds are already in mid-September.
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