Cultivation mania!

Our spring peas after tractor cultivation

It's been another busy week at the CSA.  While the dry weather means we have to start irrigating again, on the plus side, conditions are perfect for tractor cultivation. We've gone over all our beets, carrots, peas, leeks, spinach, scallions, fennel, cabbage, potatoes, parsnips, greens and lettuce with various cultivating implements, uprooting all the weeds in between rows. Crabgrass, lambsquarter and nutsedge are tenacious, though, so it's important that the soil be dry when cultivating so that all those weeds don't re-root.

The fun doesn't stop with the tractors, though! With many of our crops, once we've cultivated in between rows with a tractor, we come back through and pull out the in-row weeds by hand. Late spring always means we are particularly busy hand-weeding and thinning carrots and beets. It is a long and sometimes tedious task, but this week we were lucky to have some help from our friends over at Alprilla Farms.  They boosted our numbers to a dirty dozen on Monday afternoon and with their help we were able to finish weeding three beds of beets in one afternoon.  By the end of the week, the crew had also finished weeding our first planting of carrots (all 7 beds!). We still have two more seedings of carrots and beets that need our attention, but we are making fantastic progress.
 
Speaking of root crops, our parsnips have started to sprout and the potatoes that a group of volunteers from Whole Foods helped us plant several weeks ago have begun to push up shoots as well.  Over the last few weeks we have been preparing our high tunnel for a planting of tomatoes.  This week we finished hooking up a hose to the drip irrigation lines which should keep our tomatoes well hydrated even in the extra heat of the high tunnel.  Out in the field we have been prepping beds and laying plastic mulch for our tomatoes, eggplant and peppers as well as our summer squash, cucumbers and watermelons.  Since many of these crops spend such a long stretch of the season in the ground, it is especially important to control the weeds between rows.  Today we had a very large group of seventh graders from Shore Country Day School helping us to spread straw mulch between the rows of our nightshade crops and laying landscaping fabric between the rows of our cucurbit beds.  Earlier in the week in the greenhouse our volunteers powered through a huge portion of the watermelon and cucumber seeding with our Greenhouse Manager Stephanie. 

After a week like this it is nice to reflect on how fantastic it is to have so many dedicated and involved volunteers to help us make this work possible. Thank you all for being so generous with your energy and enthusiasm. Honestly I don't know if it would be possible without you and I look forward to seeing and meeting more of you in the future.