Wow, we’ve definitely been getting some much needed moisture! I’m sure the plants are loving it. It looks like rain is in the forecast for the week or so… love the moisture, but I am missing the sun!

Over the weekend we managed to get some work done in between the rain. On Monday, Tracy, Neil, and I got caught up on planting seedlings and seeding some more rows. If Weds is free of rain, we’ll get the final seedlings planted, seed a few more rows, and then the weeding begins… again. Amazing how fast the weeds grow, but once the veggies are growing bigger, they will help crowd out the weeds. That is already happening with one row of arugula.

Overall, things are looking great! Some items are going a little slower than expected, but I heard a similar comment from another farmer. I think with all this rain, hopefully followed by some warm sunny days, things will start to explode in the garden. (Exploding growth, that is…)

So far, the hardest part about farming for me is keeping up with my farm notes. I’m keeping detailed notes on each item planted, with detail on when it was seeded, when it germinated and at what percent, transplants, and all of that detail. I’m getting most of the detail, but once in a while is miss a detail here and there. For anyone doing a farm (especially just beginning one), take good notes!

One example of not so good note-taking: Being that we have two very small hobby-sized greenhouses, we combined different varieties of seed in seedling trays. I had great notes for the initial seeding. Once the seedlings were ready to transplant into a bigger seedling trays, I had okay notes–to missing notes. It is definitely very important to keep tight notes when the seedlings are playing musical chairs. So, for some tomatoes and peppers, we’ll have to wait until they fruit before we know which plant is which. Sigh.

One lesson learned here is keep detailed notes! The other is one seedling tray, one seed variety… no mixed trays as we did this year. For the number of seeds we started in the greenhouse, that means we need more space than the two small greenhouses we have. Next year we’ll setup a larger hoophouse for our plant starts.

Today Tracy, Jillian, Bunny, Jenny and Leslie helped plant a ton of seedlings! We’ve planted most of the basil seedlings, a good deal of the tomatoes, eggplant, and various peppers. We ended up with more tomato plants and pepper plants than we originally planned. That is okay since we’ll probably have more to sell at the farm stand and to restaurants.

Neil helped Tracy start planting the basil and tomatoes while I cut openings for the plants in the ground cloth. Lots of stuff going in the ground this week….

Too bad we can’t sell the Lamb’s Quarters weeds, or Bind Weed! Lamb’s Quarters is actually edible, and nutritious, and have a similar taste to spinach or chard.

Aside from a bountiful harvest of weeds, we have a lot of veggies popping up nicely. I’ve also been planting a ton more seed–green and yellow beans, winter squash, more radishes, more lettuce, and more warm weather crops to follow.

As I mentioned in an previous post, we are using drip irrigation on all of our rows, even the circular perennial/herb garden. I wasn’t sure if the drip tape would work curved in a circle… thinking that once it pressurized it would roll out straight like a one of those party noisemakers.

But, to my joy it did not do that when it filled with water. (Well, to be honest I thought it would’ve been funny if it did do that… as long as it didn’t damage any plants, and as long as I was there to see it happen!)

Our main rows started with one line of drip tape down the center, but after a little testing we decided to add a second line to each row. With our rows being around 42″ wide, and using intensive planting, it seemed necessary to use two lines to get better water coverage.

The drip tape seems to be the way to go, and so does the floating row cover. The row cover makes a huge difference in both helping to slow moisture loss from the soil (as compared to uncovered rows), and in creating a micro-climate for the plants.