Early May Farm Update!
It’s been a busy couple of weeks here on the farm. From seeding to building and planning we have some updates we’re excited to share with everyone. This time of year, especially this year, is a nice return to normal for us. With how crazy life seems when you tune into the news, we feel really lucky to have at least some part of our life seem like normal. Getting our hands in the dirt and seeing our seeds sprout to life is comforting in these uncomfortable times.
Seeding
We already posted about how we started planting our seeds about two weeks ago but this week we did our second round of seeding. Unlike conventional corn and soybean farms who usually plant once a year in the spring, we are continuously planting all season long to keep a steady supply of produce available in our CSA shares, Farm Stand, and farmers market. In fact, the last seeds we plant each year are usually in September! To be fair, we are definitely a lot more busy seeding in the spring and the amount of planting we do is certainly less during the summer.
Almost all of the first seeds we’ve planted are up and overall things look pretty great! We’ve got excellent stands of peas, carrots, lettuce, arugula, beets, cilantro, spinach, and kohlrabi. We’ve even got some sweet corn up (though it might not survive the frost). We haven’t planted any warm season crops like cucumbers, peppers or watermelon yet but they will be planted in the next 1-2 weeks.
Building
Many of you know that we sold our house in March this year which also means that we sold our washing and storage building (our old garage) and that our new facility is not done yet. Since we need somewhere to store our veggies between now and when our new pack shed is done, we’ve had to construct a new temporary walk-in cooler which is well under way. We finally have power at our farm site and within the next few weeks we should have running water and have begun construction on our new pack shed. We can’t wait!
The frame of our walk-in cooler.
Weather
You can’t be a farmer, or a Minnesotan for that matter, without talking about the weather. Overall, the weather has been pretty great (with a few exceptions) this spring. We’ve had fairly warm temperatures overall and we’ve never been able to plant as early as we did this year. That said, the weather has not been without it’s challenges. We’ve had days where it’s been so windy that we were unable to do any work in the field and the plastic on our tunnel sustained some damage. We were able to repair the plastic but it is very likely that we will need to replace it by the end of this season.
In addition, it’s been pretty dry this spring. We could really use a good shot of rain in the neighborhood of one to two inches of rain. The rain is necessary to get our seeds to sprout and to make sure our transplanted crops get well established. Finally, and most damaging of all, the multiple freezing nights this weekend are damaging our tomatoes and peppers which are currently in our tunnel. It’s actually so cold that even the tunnel is not enough protection for them. We’ll see where we turn out after this cold, but it’s likely we’ll have to purchase new plants (if possible - many farms are sold out) or have our tomato and pepper crop be delayed by a few weeks. We’ll keep you posted on how we turn out.
Broiler chickens!
Lara and I miss raising livestock (we had to sell our flock of laying hens to facilitate our move) so, for a couple of reasons, we’ve decided to raise around 100 broiler chickens (meat chickens). We are very interested in incorporating livestock into our operation and broiler chickens are a relatively low cost way to get started. We are also able to process up to 1000 chickens on our farm without inspection from the department of ag and with all the scary stuff in the news about meat packing plants closing, we thought we’d do our part to help provide healthy, sustainable meat to our community.
We will be ordering our flock for the early part of August with an anticipated processing date of late September. We’ll be taking pre-orders for our birds on our website with a deposit of $5/bird. We will butcher the birds for you on our farm and they can be picked up at the Mankato Farmers Market, with your CSA, or on the farm. We’ll also show you how to cook them perfectly every time whether in the oven or on the grill and we’ll show you how to get the most out of every bird. Lara and I are able to turn one chicken into nearly a weeks worth of meals.