Another 3 little pigs have arrived at the farm from Warren Wilson!

We love our Warren Wilson piggies because they are so social, mostly because they spend the first few weeks of their life on campus with a lot of loving students, thus receiving all kinds of attention from the time they are born. Some folks ask why we always raise 3 pigs together. The answer is because we are such a small scale operation, and pigs being the social creatures they are, just need one another for companionship. I do feel sorry for these new babies because they are not getting the attention from us as Huey, Dewey and Louie because we are at the “peak” of our season so are spending most of our time out in the fields.

Last week was spent trying to save a few crops from the weeds and FINALLY (in our crops opinion, I think) have set up irrigation and are now irrigating our spring and summer fields for most of the crops planted in our fenced area. Carl also set up drip irrigation for our winter squash and we are giving them the much needed water. Next priority is to set up irrigation in the onion and potato field. THESE CROPS are DRY and needing a drink. (We accomplished this on 6/6)

I have learned this season that mice LOVE sprouts. It seems as though they are taking over our propagation greenhouse, digging little sprouts out of the cells of dirt in our flats, and so far have eaten pepper sprouts (early in the season – costing us about $100 loss in seed costs), then indulging in melons (both watermelon and cantaloupe – costing us about $50 loss in seed costs) and finally eating summer squash (costing us probably another $50 loss in seed costs). I guess they didn’t read the news from Germany that sprouts are tainted with E.coli. Just so you know, we are working at ridding the mice from our greenhouse and have grand plans for continuing to seed, transplant and harvest food for the CSA and markets regardless of what the mice have done to set us back a little!

Interesting articles I’ve read the past couple weeks. Not sure if you readers can access these since the NY Times started selling subscriptions, I sure hope so, mostly because I find these articles interesting and related to food production!

PRODUCTION NOTE TO SELF: (1) We cut back on the greenhouse eggplant but need an extra bed. We only have one bed planted in G2 because the mice ate a lot of our seeds. (2) Cover eggplant once transplanted to the field. We have done this for the past several years with hoops but couldn’t find our hoops. I think floating row cover would be perfect. (3) Carl and I aren’t able to do the workload as in years past so need to decrease production. (4) Be more proactive about ridding the mice from the greenhouse.