In mid-July, each week is a bit of a blur. Irrigation took a back seat for another week as storms seemed to roll in every other day or so. While that made it tricky to find some dry days to harvest, we did manage to pull in about 80% of the 18,000 garlic bulbs we planted and…
After last week’s soaking rain brought an end to an essentially rain-less June, we found ourselves in the opposite situation. Almost daily showers and thunderstorms made it difficult for us to prepare new beds for planting, add fertilizer, and cultivate. Luckily weather forecasting has improved a great deal over the past few decades and we had a…
What a difference one half inch of rain can make. If I was writing this just a few days ago, I would bemoan the hot, dry, rain-less weather we had for over a month. June is arguably the busiest month of the year for us, as planting and weeding tasks peak, the harvest ramps up, and we…
It’s hard to believe the summer solstice has come and gone. It’s good we have a lot of daylight, because we’ve got a whole lot of projects going on. After the coldest May I can remember, we had approximately one week of “pleasant” weather, and now it has turned seriously hot and dry. Planting can be tricky in…
Every spring we bring to life a brand new crop plan and start planting with high hopes. We never know what spring will bring us, but we do know that once June hits, things get a little squirrely when the plan meets reality. This year was no different, except adding to the generally unpredictable nature of farming…
Summer seems to have finally arrived, in a big bang that took us from wearing heavy coats to short pants in about 5 days. It’s been one of the weirdest three month periods for everyone in the world, and the combination of very cold weather in April and May, along with trying to adjust to social…
I’ve been trying to block the early-November freezes and the never-ending April rains out of my mind, because the growing season book ended by those less-than-ideal months was one of the best we have ever had. The crew has spent the last few weeks trying to stay one step ahead of record low temperatures. Everything we could…
Fall is in high gear, the World Series of baseball is on, and Halloween is fast approaching, which can mean only one thing: it’s time to plant the garlic. One of the things we hear a lot at the farm is that our garlic is so much better than what you can get in the store. It’s…
While fall in Connecticut is famous for the red and yellow foliage in the trees, my favorite color this time of year is the beautiful green that our cover crops show as they reach their peak. A few frosts don’t bother them at all, and they will keep growing until we get a freezing night in…
Everywhere you look this past week, the landscape just screamed “New England fall.” Bright fall foliage (mostly), clear skies, crisp apples, and butternut squash and pumpkins. Meanwhile, the lack of a hard frost means that the fall crops keep trucking along, with peppers, broccoli, some crazy nice lettuce and salad mix, and even tomatoes in great abundance. The…
Even when the end of the season seems to cruise along as nicely as this one has, we know there will be some bumps in the road, and this late in the year that bump tends to be the first frost. So last Monday, when we saw lows in the 30’s forecasted for later in the…
Another week of sunny, bright days and pleasant temperatures has me feeling like we have been beamed over to California. It’s made bringing in the harvest so much easier since we were able to get in the field EVERY day this September. This is good, because even though it was a very hot summer, we got enough…
We flipped the calendar to fall on Monday, but the first day of leaf season came on the heels of a late-season heat wave. The warm dry weather (and lots of timely irrigation) has juiced the growth of our fall crops, and we have some really great late season lettuce and cooking greens this week. We’ve binned…
The late-summer beautiful weather streak keeps on chugging, bringing us warm days, cool nights, and an amazing pile of work to try to get through each week. September is always a tough month for us, because our “summer crew” folks leave, but the task list actually increases. While we still have summer crops like cukes and…
The last week has made it abundantly clear that fall is in the air. Cool nights, heavy morning dew, and warm, clear days have made the work very pleasant. I think these are the kinds of days people refer to when they think wistfully about having an “outside job,” conveniently forgetting the days when your sweat soaks…