Dryer weather makes for some huge accomplishments!

The weather has been cooperating with us and in between rain showers we were able to transplant around 3/4 acre of onions and about 1/2 acre of potatoes.   We even transplanted another succession of broccoli.  Now we need to plow our summer growing area and are once again praying for dry weather so we can plow that field.

Thanks to a very conscientious and dedicated crew, we worked around the weather, putting in an extra hour or so and starting a little earlier than we have been, allowing us to complete transplanting to the field all the onions that were ready to be out of the greenhouse, after which they received a nice rain fall last Friday and Saturday to help them transition through their transplant shock.

Something WONDERFUL about our crew is that Danielle, Townes and Nern have offered to do evening chores 3 times each weeknight giving Carl and I those nights off. HOW AWESOME IS THAT?

The pigs decided they were ready for pasture this week after they escaped out of their play pen (a.k.a. The Livestock barn) and began hanging out with the goats, free ranging around the farm, so we herded them into their summer home and now they are eating a lot of clover, vetch and rye. The pigs seem very content on their pasture with the “all you can eat buffet” of cover crops. (NOTE: It is interesting the similarity between the kale, onions and pigs. The onions and kale were outgrowing their little cells of dirt – similar to the pigs outgrowing their play pen in the livestock barn – all of these wanting and needing more space/nutrients to grow and flourish!)

We are in the process of potting up plants that we will be selling over the next few weeks and are excited about supplying folks in our area with both vegetable and herb cultivars adapted to our mountain climate. If you need some plants for your garden visit us at the North Asheville Tailgate Market or the The Whole Bloomin’ Thing in Waynesville.

PRODUCTION NOTE TO SELF: The mice have eaten a couple successions of our peppers. Soon after the peppers sprout, the mice eat the sprouts, so far causing us $100 in seed money not to mention our crop will be transplanted into the field several weeks late. For our greenhouse crop next year we need to seed 200 Red, 150 Yellow and 150 Orange bell peppers. Also need to seed 150 eggplant. We had poor germination so need to bump up this number for insurance purposes. I was hoping we would have had time this past week to weed our greenhouse crops in preparation for a tour scheduled for next Monday. Oh well…. I do want to invest in black plastic mulch just for weed prevention in our greenhouses. This would save labor in having to weed the houses all the time.