July 4th-10th

Greetings Gardeners! This is Paula!

Wow! A lot happened this week, including a wonderful first farm visit, sunny weather, an eventful Farmers' Market and a thriving garden!

Monday

We hope everyone had a happy 4^thof July! The sunny weather sure gave a growth boost to our plants! Especially my research plots! For my research I am studying companion planting with a focus on the Three Sisters Method. For those of you who don’t know, this is planting corn, beans and squash in mounds so that they can cooperate to increase yields and be more efficient. The beans fix the nitrogen from the atmosphere that the squash and corn can use in the soil and the corn acts as a stake to support the beans, while the squash protect the other two with their spiky vines and shade out weeds with their large leaves. Here are some pictures, everything looks so good so far!

Plot immediately after tilling.

Circle Plot mounds with squash corn and beans.

Squash in the Control Plot

Thriving corn and beans in a mound

Tuesday

The weeds are starting to creep up in all our plots, so we spent a good part of the morning driving them back. We used the oscillator hoes on the experimental plots, which worked pretty well to deter the weeds in addition to hand weeding. I was very excited because the squash seedlings in my research mounds are germinating now, just poking through the soil.

Carrots!

Basil!

Squash from my research mound

Wednesday

Worked on freeing the hot plot, no-till plot and free space from weeds. The most common weeds are purslane, carpetweed, lamb’s quarters, and dandelion. Some upcoming projects we may have are painted signs and laminated explanations of what the project is about on posts in the garden. Also started working on trellising the tomatoes in the hot plot that were extras from the experimental plot plants. The technique we are using is called the Florida Weave and it involves weaving through the plants and stakes to keep the tomatoes held in pairs at different levels to keep everything steady and supported.

Flowering watermelon and tomatoes

Florida Weave Trellising

Thursday

Farmer’s Market Day! And almost all of my research mounds and control rows were fully germinated! Some of the Striped German tomatoes were toppling over from the heavy rain and their increasing size. We made mounds around all the fallen ones to encourage a straight stalk and soon start guiding them towards our A-frame string trellis. The radishes in our free space are looking large and lovely, so we are excited to possibly sell them at the Farmer’s Market next week! We hilled them to protect them from the hot sun and to see if some of the smaller ones will increase in size by next week. They are Easter Egg radishes, so they come in all shades of purple, red and white, which should look very appealing in bundles.

The Farmers’ Market was great fun this week! The commons was so full of vendors that we had to squish the South Hadley librarian’s table in our tent, which was nice since during the customer lulls there was time for conversation. We also received an EBT Machine in the Manager’s Tent, and one customer used it, so soon we should be experts at operating the machine (it is easier to operate than it looks). I got a little entrepreneurial experience while covering for a couple vendors on errands and breaks, making six sales and seeing the market in a different perspective. It’s good practice for when we start selling our own produce.

Friday

It was raining very heavily all morning, so we met a little later in the morning. We had planned to volunteer at Farmacy Gardens this morning, but had to cancel because of the rain. L Oh well, I guess we can try next week. It was nice to see everything so well watered after that all-night storm. We spent the time weeding some of the rebellious carpetweed that spreads really fast and planning our farm visits. Tomorrow looked liked there would be lovely weather, so we decided to go to Crimson and Clover Farm’s Saturday Volunteer Day to see their operations and help out at a real farm. Sooooo exciting!

Two pesky weeds: Purslane and Carpetweed

Later in the afternoon, Ingrid and I tried to finish off the Florida Weave tomato trellising in the Hot Plot. It was a tad tricky for me, but Ingrid led the way to victorious rows. The technique made the tomatoes look much better thanks to Ingrid’s skillful row weaving. Suddenly, the sky seemed to darken and we heard the ominous rumble of thunder and we barely left the garden when the heavy downpour began.

Saturday

Crimson and Clover Farm Adventure Here We Come!!!

The day was beautiful today with just the right amount of sun and breeze to make it hot but not unbearably so. Ingrid and I took off for Florence, MA where the farm is located. We did make a couple wrong turns and ended up in the next town over, but luckily we quickly got on track again so that soon we were walking down the dirt road with one of the farm managers to the U-Pick plot where we could work. We were greeted by the other farm manager and two summer workers and soon set to work on our first task: pulling up stakes in the pea rows. Do not be fooled readers! This was not as easy as it sounds. The stakes were driven in pretty deep (deeper than our own caveman sledgehammer could make them anyway…) and we all were using shovel to dig them out and pull. But this was fun nonetheless because both of us were distracted by the open beauty of the fields around us. Everything was neat in rows and the landscape seemed to be a natural masterpiece blending the green sprawling bounty with the large blue sky splotched with puffy white clouds.

The tranquil beauty was somewhat disrupted by the piercing cries of a hawk above us in a nest settled among some conifers. It sounded slightly like a seagull, but a bit more shrill and persistent, but it definitely lent a “wild” feel to the scenery.

We even found this dazed looking moth that blended imperfectly with one of the wood poles. Innocent sleeping moth or crafty pest waiting for nightfall to feast of the fruits of farm labor? (Yes, the pest paranoia syndrome has kicked in J)We let it go free but got some pictures. (I hope it didn’t tag along with us back to the garden because it looked big enough to eat a lot of kale!)

Yikes!

After removing the stakes we helped weed the parsley and pepper rows, and before we knew it, it was 4pm. We did get a mini farm tour (and fun back of pick-up ride) in the fields and learned some interesting techniques they use in the farm.

Lessons learned this week:

-The Florida Weave is an affective trellising mechanism for tomatoes in rows.

-Planting in quarter spaces, meaning a huge square space is divided into four to hold sections of plant families like brassica and cucurbit. Their squash looked very impressive and their corn was way past knee-high!

-Weed suppression can be achieved by regular hand weeding, but the soil contains a very large weed seed bank, meaning that even as a farmer hand-weeds there are always other seeds lurking beneath the soil, waiting for their chance in the sunlight. so what Crimson and Clover Farm does is leave areas fallow, letting the weeds grow in and then harrowing them down every two weeks throughout the summer, so that the seed bank is exhausted and the vegetables planted next growing season have pretty much a weed free summer in the field.

This is a very innovative idea and definitely something to consider for future garden projects. I know that one year in our garden, an intern experimented with vegetable growth in an area that she would not weed the whole summer. Maybe someone’s future project could be experimenting with the seed bank in the garden? In any case, we always try not to scrape to heavily at the soil when using the oscillator hoes to make sure not to expose those dormant weed seeds.

Some of our Kohlrabi!

-On a similar note, leaving fields fallow with cover crop ensures that the soil nutrients are replenished and minimizing the need for fertilizer application. Crimson and Clover uses a rye grass in parts of their field, like we do!

-Use fences. Everywhere. We asked the Crimson and Clover Farm farmhands about predation on the farm, since part of the fields looked pretty close to forested areas. They told us that they get some small critters, but mostly deer, but the fence surrounding all the fields seem to keep them out.

-Farms are beautiful! Speaking of which, like I already mentioned, this coming week we plan to start putting up signs in the plots to talk about our projects, which should make our garden visitor friendly!

Sunny days,

Paula