Farmers must have a skewed outlook on the weather compared to normal people.  Sure, I want sunny summer days - but I also want some rain about every three days and I’ve been hoping for the usual Art Fair weather to get our heirloom tomatoes ripening.  So some days in the nineties with the chance of precipitation are just what I’ve been hoping for, forgive me if that’s not your idea of perfect weather.

    The three acres that comprise Cornman Farm are just chock full of all sorts of veggies.  Everything’s looking healthy and the good bugs are duking it out with the bad bugs.  The Brandywine and Striped German tomatoes are over six feet tall and loaded with softball sized green tomatoes.  The field of potatoes is blooming in shades of puple and white.  We’re picking carrots, cabbage, kohlrabi and cucumbers this week and the garlic is being pulled to cure in the barn.  The summer squash is close as well as some funky broccolis and cherry tomatoes will start showing up at the Roadhouse soon.

    A final thought for fellow garden geeks - I’ve been noticing toads and frogs in the garden and its making me excited.  They’re both sensitive to chemicals and pesticides and we want to avoid all of that in our organic approach.  If they are present, the system is healthy.

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WOW!  Everything out at Cornman Farm is a different shade of green.  The carrot tops, tomatoes and potatoes are deep green.  The parsnips and peas are a lighter shade and the alliums have their own dusky verdant shade.  4000 tomato plant and 3500 pepper plants are finally in the ground and last week has been about doing battle with the weeds, a row at a time.  We’ll continue to clean the weeds from all the beds and begin putting up trellissing…

    I wrote before how we had started making compost for this year’s growing season last year in May.  We used horse manure and all the kitchen scraps from the Roadhouse kitchen plus coffee grounds and tea leaves.  Alex would haul about a thousand pounds away each week to Cornman Farm and we slowly built a mountain of a compost pile.  It was turned several times last year and has sat maturing to one side of the garden through the…

Driving a tractor is a whole lot of fun.  About 2 years ago after Alex bought his 40 horsepower bright orange Kubota diesel tractor I teased him that most successful men buy a sports car when they reach their forties.  Last summer there just wasn’t enough time to learn all the complexities of this important piece of farm machinery, so Alex was the default tractor man.  There are about 10 forward speeds and 5 reverse speeds plus all sorts of…

I wrote last week we were planning to start from seed all our tomato and pepper starts. In the course of 2 days Anna and I started 3600 peppers and 3700 tomatoes. We want about 3400 total starts of each and the extra is insurance if some seeds don’t germinate or the plants don’t make it to the the end of May when we will transplant them. The tomatoes sprouted out of their small cell containers in the course of…