New Leaf Organics
One Farming Mama
Hello There,
Well it seems like it is a season of feast or famine, as far as water goes. The farm is now officially well watered once again. With this cloud cover can come disease, unfortunately. Our outdoor tomatoes are beginning to show signs of early blight. This is not the same as Late Blight which essentially kills off your plants in a very fast and disgusting way. Instead, early blight is more like a slow, suffering for your plants, and incidentally, us as well. WIth the return of the sun the spreading will slow, but in the mean time, once it has arrived we have to try to be as careful as possible not to spread it around the farm, and most importantly not into the tomato greenhouse. Some farms really take extreme precautions, asking people to sterilize their clothes, shoes, etc.. before walking around the farm. We will just be trying to keep anyone who has been near the infected area on the farm out of the uninfected areas.
Otherwise, we are beginning to prepare some of the fields for Winter with cover cropping. We just mowed down the cover crop in our asparagus field and will begin to get it ready for Winter Rye. Winter Rye is one of the only cover cropping options we have living in our climate. When you plant it in September, or even later, it can manage to overwinter, holding on to our precious soil from erosion and weather, and then sprout again first thing in the Spring. This will give it a solid few weeks head start before we could get in there with our tractor to plant something mid April. Part of what I love about farming is the necessity to always be thinking months and months ahead to what you would like to find in your fields come next year.
Along with the abundance of tomatoes we find ourselves with, the artichokes are really starting to go crazy. These plants we definitely grow just because they are so cool to look at in the field. Yes, my family loves them, but they really are pretty awesome to just look at. I don’t have any real creative ideas for how to prepare them other then the old fashioned way involving lots of melted butter; why mess with perfection?
Have a good week. Thinking about canning tomatoes? This is the week.
Jill and Crew
