Sorry it's been so long since last post. We've been busy as always. We have planted the potatoes and they are begining to sprout. Peas are up. After we planted all the greens and radishes we had a 7" rain that washed most of the seed away, so we replanted the other day just in time for another big rain, so we'll have to wait and see if they come up or are washed away again! Right now we are in the begging of our best strawberry season yet! Last Friday we picked for market 197 quarts of strawberries, and if I could figure out how to get pictures off my cell phone and on to here I could show you a really huge strawberry we picked. I always forget to take my camera out with me, but I always have my phone! We got the plastic on our hoop house and tomatoes planted in two of them. Our ginger is sprouting in the green house and will be ready to plant out into the hoop house soon. We've planted out mizuna, arugala, kale and swiss chard plugs and they are looking good. Our green onions have been growing well and have the hugest green onions ever. We are still hauling a couple loads of manure each week to keep adding to our compost piles. Our newest aquistion was a manure spreader, so that makes spreading our compost a little faster and easier onto our garden areas. This year we started extra heirloom tomato, pepper and herb plants to sell at market. Last week we took the first of our heirloom tomato plants to sell. So we are still here and still planting. I'm just slow about getting any blogging done.

Well it's been up in the 80's this week and the Forsythia bushes, Red bud trees, daffodils, and Peach trees are blooming. The apple trees are about to pop out, too. This is way too early for things to be this far along. Only hope of having any fruit is that there won't be another freeze, but that's kind of hard to hope for as this is only the middle of March. So far the strawberries haven't started blooming and hopefully won't for a while. We've got our ginger pre-started in the greenhouse. That is our "new" crop for this year. Am looking forward to growing it and seeing how well it does and if we can sell it at all!

We've been planting onions outside. Have already picked two ticks off me, and three off the dog!

Of course now that the weather is nice and we want to plant, the rain and storms have arrived. We need it to dry up before we can get beds made to start planting, but we also need the rain, as we got little moisture this winter. We are to get rain and storms again this evening. Hopefully all it is is rain, nothing damaging like hail or high winds.

We've been trying to work on our hoop house and replacing plastic, but that is something that needs very calm days to get on! We've got the ends done for the most part, waiting to get the top on.

Well it's the first of February and winter has really yet to arrive! It's been an amazingly mild winter, which leads one to wonder what our Spring and Summer will be like?
We've been hauling manure from a local horse barn and composting up a storm! Greg has most of his seeds ordered and a lot of them have already come in the mail. Tonight we are going to work on starting some of the heirloom tomatoes that we want to set out in the hoop house later. We've still got mizuna and arugula in one of the hoop houses.
We've been selling at the Columbia winter market. We still have winter squash, but are pretty much out of sweet potatoes. We do have some frozen though and also frozen strawberries.
We've been to a couple of conferences and picking up new ideas and learning new things!So even though it's winter we are still keeping busy, but at a slower pace which is nice.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I have much to be thankful for. All the crops are finished, picked and put in storage. We have all the plots cleaned and plowed. The only thing left to do is the hoop houses. We are still getting greens out of one of them. It has been a very different and trying year, but we are still here and planning on next years crop, we are already receiving seed catalogs in the mail!

To those of you that were in our CSA program this summer, I'm sorry we had to shut down mid season, but I felt family issues were more important and needed to be addressed and I'm sorry I didn't feel I could do that with the CSA commitments. That's life and I'm very grateful and thankful to and for my family. Thanks to those of you who supported us by participating in our CSA and buy from us at Farmers' market. We couldn't do what we do without you guys, so thank you.

We hope you all have a safe and great Thanksgiving and a joyous, stress free Christmas season! Thanks!

I thought I would post my Thanksgiving sweet potato dish that I plan to fix for tomorrow. I don't have amounts as I'm a kind of dump and go kind of cook at least where casseroles are concerned.

SWEET POTATO CASSEROLE
Sweet potatoes peeled and cubed, 1 sweet onion chunked, sliced dried apples (or fresh will work, too), peeled and chunked mangoes, salt and pepper to taste. I like heavier on the pepper than just a couple of sprinkles. Put all this in a baking dish and then drizzle with maple syrup and bake covered until potatoes are soft.

This works great also with winter squash! Hope you enjoy.

It's officially Fall, but you couldn't tell it by the weather this week. Yesterday and today up in the 80's! You can't beat that! So far we've only had a light frost and it hasn't killed anything.

We have tomatoes still coming out in the field, and in the hoop house we have peppers galore and eggplant. We've got all the winter squash picked and put in the barn. We had an abundant sweet potato crop, so we are looking good.

We've been working on winding up the electric fence around the old strawberry patch and getting ready to get it all tore up. We've been cutting runners off the new strawberry patch, they are just going to town with all this warm weather. Greg has got a couple of the garden plots plowed up for winter, so we are slowly making progress.

It's hard to believe that Thanksgiving is only a month away. It's time to think back and remember all of our blessings and all the things we have to be Thankful for!

These have been trying times in more ways than one. I had to close down our CSA operation because of some family issues that I needed more time to deal with. The summer heat and lack of rain was hard on produce. Our dried bean crop was a total failure, we had no zucchini or cucumbers. Our field tomatoes did not do the best either. When the temperature gets over 90 degrees the blooms drop off and do not set fruit. Greg did start digging the sweet potatoes and they look to be promising. Will be anxious to see how some of the new varieties that we planted will do, and how well people will respond to them. He also got the strawberry tips that we had rooted earlier planted. We are getting okra still and the peppers and eggplant that we planted in the hoop house are really doing well. We have not started to pick any winter squash or pumpkins yet, but they don't look like they did really well either. This is the fun and frustration of farming. To be a farmer you have to be an eternal optimist, because you are always hoping that next year will be a better year than the last!

Well continued excessive heat for over 3 weeks now. Tuesday we had 108 degrees. As the local weather man said, and I quote, "We blew the record of 104 away"! Then I heard same weather man say yesterday that we had a cold front move through. So I went and looked at my thermometer and saw it was only 95 degrees and I realized I guess he was right, that was a 13 degree drop from the day before!

So what does this all mean? Well the green beans and dried beans are pretty much dried up. We do irrigate the green beans, but not the dried beans, but even with water they just won't set fruit when temperatures are around 85 or above. Same with the summer squash and cucumbers. The tomatoes are not doing to bad, but again when the fruit that's already set is ripe there will be a lag before more tomatoes are available because the blooms will have fallen off during this heat. The one thing that loves this heat is the okra. We've been cutting about 15 gallons worth each week!

Yesterday we went to pick up our 3,000 strawberry tips, so now we have to get those potted so they can get a good root system going. Then we have to put them under a misting system that sprinkles every 3 or so minutes for a minute at a time. Should be fun in this heat!