This is the big week, the one we've been planning and working for since seeding began over the winter: Summer markets re-open! This Saturday, we return to Sheridan School after over 2 months of absence. We re-open our Tuesday evening summer market at Sheridan, and we kick-off our re-opening of the new Wednesday evening market at the Watkins School in SE! 

You will see some new and familiar faces at our markets this summer. Jennifer will be joining the Saturday crew every other week, switching off with Pearl. And you will all get a chance to meet our new apprentices, too. Perhaps you saw Emma the past couple weeks at Sunday, and soon you will meet Heather, who is managing the Tuesday evening market. Marc and Lindsey are both enthusiastic about working markets, so you will get a chance to see them, too! And don't forget to say hi to our regular market-goers, folks like Grace, and Maria (who will be at Saturdays, Tuesdays, AND Wednesdays -- a true superstar) and her daughter Amanda (Saturdays and Wednesdays).

Things have finally started to warm up, after the cool weekend and rainy early week, and now the temps are looking to be regularly in the high 70s, 80s and even 90s. These temps are GREAT for the spring/summer crops like the ripening strawberries, the flowering beans, and the quickly growing summer squash. As the days get longer and longer, and the temps rise, all the growth speeds up and everything comes on.

Over the winter, we started carrying freshly roasted coffee from Standing Stone Coffee Company, a roaster and coffee shop in Huntingdon, PA, a town about 45 mins from our farm. We are thrilled to be able to offer these coffees, as they are roasted specially for us on Fridays before market. Plus, we are confident we are choosing ethically sourced coffee beans, because the folks at Standing Stone make frequent trips to their farmers/suppliers in Central America. This Saturday, those folks will be coming down to market so that you can sample some of their freshly brewed coffee and learn more about their beans. Be sure to try a cup! 

PLUS! Special event for the coffee sampling: Jim is picking up some FRESH, HOT, HOMEMADE DONUTS from a little bakery in Hagerstown to go with your coffee. Don't miss this! All of us on the farm (not going to market) are jealous we will be missing this!

Tomorrow's market will have so many beautiful veggies: asparagus, green peppers, cucumbers and summer squash, and lots and lots of greens. Plus eggs, breads, baked goods, cheese...AND....STRAWBERRIES! (Ours aren't quite ready yet BUT we are sourcing most of them from the co-op so they are organic...and delicious!)

Grace's recipes this week feature some of these amazing summer flavors: Summer Squash and Mint Sandwiches and Asparagus with Hazelnuts:

by Jennifer

For most non-farm people, the weather is not a driving force of their day. Checking the weather helps you decide what to wear, if you need an umbrella,  if you want to drive or walk or bike. Everyone grumbles when the weatherman's forecast does not become reality.  

On a vegetable farm, however, the weather is always a major factor determining the work we do, when we do it and how we do it: from germinating seeds, to transplanting, to weeding/cultivating, from harvest to storage, and up to selling at market. A wrong forecast can scramble an entire day’s, if not week’s, plan for work.

Although we know we can’t control the weather, we have developed a few superstitions and traditions. We know that if all market-goers from the farm bring our rain gear (rain pants, coat and boots) with us down to market, that it won’t rain during that market, even (and especially) if it is forecast. This has worked almost EVERY time. The few times when one worker left their rain gear behind: downpour. On the farm, we believe that overhead irrigation is linked to rain. If you want to rain, run the overhead irrigation. It is strange how often this works. Caitlan will go out into the dry field, spending an hour at least setting up the pipes and the pump, get it all running, watering the little carrots and beets, and then an hour into her set: rain. But we had no way to deter the late threat of frost last week.

The strong cold front that came in last Thursday night brought along a chance of frost. We were already in the process of removing, bundling, and organizing all the row cover that had been out in the field since early April, but the chance of frost had us unravelling and re-deploying all of it again.  It seemed somewhat unlikely that a frost would actually occur, but we did not want to take that risk with plants that represent three months of work, and which constitute almost all of our vegetables to harvest in June and July.  So last Friday at 1:30 PM, we called all hands on deck for row cover, and the transplanting and tomato mulching was pushed off to another day.

Timing is crucial for efficient, effective tillage, seeding, transplanting, cultivation, irrigation, trellising, pest management, disease management, and harvest.  Therefore, we are constantly and repeatedly checking several weather forecasts (NOAA, Weather.com, Weather Underground), and always making best guesses about what may actually happen on the farm. We’re thinking about the next week, few days, tomorrow, tonight, this afternoon, and the next few hours.  Despite our best efforts, our expectations are often not accurate, and as a team we work to pivot very quickly from focusing on harvesting basil say, to packing produce indoors.

Even something as delicate and mundane as nightly dew affects our work. Leafy greens like lettuce, spinach, chard, bok choi, parsley and kale are best harvested in the early morning while the temperature is cooler, and the dew remains on the leaves.  The dew is vital to keep these easily wilting crops fresh from our field to your table.  

Harvest managers check the dew first thing in the morning, then look at the sky to determine if cloud cover may extend their window of harvest, while considering how long the sun has been up, and the temperature, all to divine whether the harvest window that morning is one and a half hours, for example, or longer or shorter. If the window is smaller, the manager asks for more people to accomplish the work more quickly.  If it turns out that thirty minutes into an hour-long harvest the clouds burn off, and cut the harvest short, we are forced us to resume the next day.

On the other hand, if the clouds and moisture linger through the day, other aspects of our work are affected. Cultivation is delayed. This practice disturbs the soil, lifting the roots of the weeds to the surface where the sun can dry out and kill them. Even if the soil is dry enough to cultivate, it is not effective at killing many weeds without at least several hours of strong sunlight. 

On cool, cloudy, wet days, we must also consider disease management. Many plant diseases thrive in moist conditions.  Late Blight of tomatoes and potatoes requires a wet leaf surface to infect a plant.  When we experience several days of cloudy moist weather, even if it doesn't actually rain, we are forced to stop working in those crops, and start supporting their health as much as possible. Post-harvest storage comes in to play on wet days, too. If we harvested wet basil, green beans, tomatoes, strawberries, or raspberries, these crops would most likely rot before they reached the market.  Berries, basil, and beans in particular spoil very quickly if harvested while wet. For these crops, we cross our fingers for dry afternoons, and the manager of these crops is often checking the patch to determine if the crop is dry enough to harvest.

We check the weather, look outside, make our best guess, and make a plan.  Then we revise our plans every couple of hours, always working to support all our crops in healthy growth so they are high quality at harvest, and stay that way till they reach market and onto your table.

This spring has been the opposite of 2012. Last year at this time, we had strawberries, everyone was wearing shorts and tshirts, the tomatoes were coming on strong...this year, we have had a couple of hot days but by the end of this week, we were all wearing our winter gear again. Unfortunately, mid-week, we had decided to remove and roll up all the row cover we had covering our sensitive crops. Usually, the risk of frost diminishes to near zero chance by this time in late May. Then we saw that the forecast had changed for this weekend: Low, 37. Now, 37 degrees doesn't necessarily mean frost, but in our valley, and with our crops that have been growing in the field for weeks, and in the greenhouse for even longer, we didn't want to take the risk.

So, yesterday afternoon, all members of the crew, including our newly arrived Jamaican H2-A seasonal workers, dispatched in teams of 4 or 5 to re-cover all those sensitive crops: beans, corn, tomatoes, squash, basil, strawberries. Anything that we could lose in a night. We worked past the end of the day to get everything protected, on a day with gusts of wind up to 20 mph, which meant that most of the row cover pieces we tacked down once had to be tacked down again after the wind yanked it up again. 

The team working today (Saturday) is spending most of their time fixing the remay that blew up overnight, and covering even MORE corn. It's almost June 1st, and we are praying there isn't a frost.

What does this mean for you, our customers, family and friends? This cool weather means that many of our summer crops may be a little slow to come in..like the corn and the beans, and the strawberries, too. We are doing everything possible to protect them, care for them, and bring them to market as soon as possible! 

This coming week is our last weekend before the first markets in June, which means we'll be back at Sheridan School on Saturday mornings and Tuesday evenings, and back at the Watkins School on Wednesday evenings, along with our Sunday morning at Dupont Circle.

This week also marks the premier of the new eggs! Our new chickens have started laying regularly and we have enough to bring a few dozen to market. So if you have been missing our eggs, come early to grab a dozen (or two). Although our chickens are free-range, when they first start laying, we keep them in their house (no cages, of course!), so they get comfortable and get used to laying in their nest boxes. We mark each new egg with an X, and distribute them among the nest boxes, until each box has an egg. These are the training eggs! When the chickens start laying more, we collect some but leave the one with the X. This makes the chickens feel secure knowing their eggs will be in the nest. Once they are laying regularly, we can collect all eggs without a problem. 

Our market offering is similar to last week's, with the notable addition of parsley, as well as a few other herbs (like lime basil!) and the sad departure of potatoes. But don't worry--our new potatoes are looking great in the field!

Our greens are starting to pick up and we have some beautiful bok choi this week--plus, Emma, one of our new apprentices, is the bok choi manager and she will be at market tomorrow, so ask her about it! We also have some colorful rainbow chard, an abundance of beet bunches with greens, the last burst of ramps for the season, and our first cutting of field spinach! 

Recipes from Grace this week will be a great addition to your labor day picnic! 
 

by Emily

The past week has been full of ups and downs--in temperature. Last Sunday and Monday nights, we were anxiously watching the forecast, the sky and the wind as we tried to determine just how low it would go, and how much extra row covering we would need to do. Sunday morning turned out to be not as bad as forecast, but Monday night was going to be worse. So we all spent 2 hours on Monday evening out in the fields, making sure all our vulnerable crops were protected. We double covered all of our beans, the strawberry patch, and some of the tomatoes. All corn was covered, all potatoes, all lettuce--anything that would take a frost too hard.

We were fortunate (and well-prepared), and most everything was spared. Save for an area in the corn patch where the cover tore and blew away, we hardly lost anything. A few strawberry blossoms here and there blackened in the frost, and a few plants that pressed up against the remay got burned, but overall, it turned out a lot better than it could have been. 

Then, later in the week, we saw temps rise into the 70s, and sunny, and we got to thinking: when to take off the row cover for good, when our Jamaican workers arrive for the season, how to divide up the crops and jobs for the season. And how we need to start harvesting the field greens because they might start bolting, and the fields are starting to fill with transplants--we finally had a dry day to plant a TON of potatoes--and how we start going back to the Sherdian School in two weeks! The season is really in full swing now.

At Dupont Circle market this week, we will have many of the same items. A couple new additions are pictured above: oregano, in limited quantities, and a delightful spring greens mix of baby chards, arugula, and tender young red russian kale. Along with the basil, this could be an aromatic and spicy topping on a healthy pizza! 

We'll be bringing more beautiful lettuce, including a few baby romaine heads. We harvested some beautiful big green leaf heads out of the tunnel this week, and the field lettuce is coming on strong! We will be bringing more of those baby beet bunches with the vibrant greens, more tender spinach, more microgreens (everyone seemed to want some!), and more RAMPS! Our ramps are from our surrounding forests, and sustainably foraged. Our bok choi is looking great too. We all know bok choi is a perfect addition to any stir fry or saute or curry (great in a thai green curry), but we like to find recipes that challenge the typical preparation. So check out this salad featuring beets, bok choy and feta! I bet some beet greens would go great in that salad, too... 

We will have more of that rhubarb that has been so beautiful. We are thinking more and more about this idea of rhubarb as a savory element to a main course, and it seems like lentils are the ideal pairing. Here's another recipe a farmer friend found: Rhubarb Lentil Soup with Creme Fraiche. You may have seen Caitlan, our new rhubarb manager, at market last weekend with her family, and her mom sent us this Rhubarb Chutney recipe:

by Emily

Harvests have finally started to pick up and our coolers are filling up with fresh spring produce. We love getting out into the fields for the first harvests. It means we've got more to eat and you've got more to choose from at market!

We had a great time last week seeing all of you pick up so much rhubarb. Well, there's more where that came from! This week, along with the fabulous rhubarb, the bok choi, and root veggies we had last week, we'll have more of that amazing kale raab, more beautiful heads of lettuce (with more varieties available this week), and more bagged baby chard and arugula. Plus, we will have a variety of herbs, scallions, and chives. New this week: spring garlic, chard bunches, beet bunches (with the most amazing greens!), and bagged spinach leaves. Plus, we're debuting a new item: 

MICROGREENS!  Microgreens are younger than baby greens. They are crunchy, and colorful, and full of nutrients. Jam-packed! Check out this article from NPR about how concentrated these little leaves really are: Introducing Microgreens: Younger, and Maybe More Nutritious, Vegetables. We're planning to offer these little greens (we have a few different variety mixes) as just cut or still living, and you can decide how you'd like to try them. They're best consumed as fresh as possible, so if you want to space them out through your week and sprinkle them on your salads each day, it's probably best to buy them with roots still on! For any questions about these mini nutrient powerhouses, ask John at market! 

This week on the blog, we're also debuting a new feature: Recipes by Grace! Many of you know Grace Lichaa from Saturday or Sunday markets, or from her Mac and Cheese article in the Wall Street Journal, or from her winning appearance on Chopped. This week, she wrote up two recipes for us, and they both sound super delicious, healthy, and easy, too: Rhubarb Lentil Salad, and her Secret Weapon Raw Kale Salad. 

by Chiron

In the late winter, we sell our old chickens to neighbors and friends, then clean out and improve the chicken coop.Then we wait for the new chickens to come.

Our chickens for this season arrived early last week- a flock of 300 Rhode Island Reds born down in Virginia. I put them all into their new home and pretty soon they'll be laying delicious brown eggs. We are crossing our fingers for them to start laying enough eggs to bring to market soon, but so far, they are focused on settling in. We will update you when we have eggs!

The day before the chickens came, I picked up and installed our three new bee hives. The bees are a Minnesota Hygienic / Carniolan cross that had been pollinating fruits in Florida. This year I decided to order our colonies in the form of nucleuses, or "nucs", which are basically an already-functioning mini hive with a mated queen, worker bees, eggs, honey, pollen, and built-out wax foundation. I transferred the five frames from each nuc into standard 10 frame Langstroth hive bodies. These three hives joined our sole surviving hive on the Hilltop area of the farm. I also bought two more to put in my own backyard, bringing my personal hives up to four!

In other news, we have had a bit of crop and equipment damage recently due to deer. Huntingdon county is very rural and mountainous- a perfect place to raise little fawns. I honor and respect the deer. They are more free than we will ever be. They don't have to wake up to alarm clocks, fix their cars, shave their faces, or do the dishes...But it can be difficult (sometimes nearly impossible!) to protect our crops from deer damage. Unfortunately for the deer, the only certain way to stop them is to hunt them.

Late one recent Friday, I took two deer off of the farm to dissuade others from grazing on crops and destroying plastic mulch. After field dressing the deer, I promptly butchered them, getting some very nice whole cuts of venison. I let very little go to waste, and even ground up over thirteen pounds. Now the carnivores on our crew can indulge! Kept the tenderloins for myself, of course.

by Emily

This year, we want to keep you updated as much as possible about what we're sending to market each week. It's going to get tough as the season intensifies, but we'll keep at it! We will (TRY!) each week to let you know what's new, with a few recipes and tips!

Tomorrow is our spring return to the Sunday morning (8:30 am-1:30 pm) Dupont Circle Freshfarm Market and we are excited to get back! We have been busy harvesting and packing out our produce all week.

So what's new? We have a variety of amazing spring greens: baby arugula, baby green and rainbow chard, kale raab, butterhead lettuce, red oakleaf lettuce, and bunched spinach! We have beautiful rhubarb, and some amazingly aromatic herbs: thyme, sage, chives, summer savory and BASIL! We've got some early scallions, too. And if you've been enjoying this cool spring and wishing you had some veggies to roast, we'll be bringing rutabagas, celeriac, purple top turnips, and potatoes.

Up until two weeks ago, I'd never tried kale raab. What is it, exactly? The raab is what happens when the kale plant is starting to flower. When we harvest, we pluck the flowering head, some leaves, and the tender stem below. We have three varieties of raab- lacinato, green, and red russian (my favorite!) varieties. I've been eating the red russian raab in my salads all week, and it is so tender and sweet--even the stem, which adds a great crunch! It's also delicious in a saute or stir-fry. If you haven't tried this spring delicacy from the beloved kale plant, pick some up tomorrow! We'll have the red russian raab in bunches and the lacinato and green varieties in bags.

Everyone knows that rhubarb pairs perfectly with strawberries. But it's still a little for strawbs, unfortunately. You can always fall back on the other rhubarb classics: Crisps, compotes, muffins. But what about a rhubarb recipe that wasn't sweet? After a quick Google search, I found this website called The Kitchn--check out these amazing savory rhubarb recipes! This Rhubarb Lentil Curry looks particularly enticing...

Speaking of savory...we have an abundance of the herb summer savory this week! This mild herb is great with roasted potatoes or in an omelet. (It's also super tasty with green beans...but that's getting ahead of ourselves...) Check out this blog post about Summer Savory for info, tips, and a couple simple recipes using this versatile herb.

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow morning!

by Jennifer

Every year, from the first seeding to the last day of frost risk in May, our main priority is establishing our field crops to bring produce to market as early as possible.  Between fall planning and preparation, and utilizing transplants, row cover, and water tubes, we can usually begin harvesting leafy crops from the fields by mid-May, and have corn and tomatoes by the first week of July.  As always on a diversified farm, the variety of vegetables adds complexity as we tailor our approach to the needs of each particular crop. 

We begin thinking about any spring planted crop the previous fall.  Since springs tend to be cool and wet, all field preparation is best done in the fall.  Field preparation may include chisel plowing for deep tillage, rototilling to help break down crop residue from the previous vegetable, laying down beds of black plastic, and coordinating and planting a winter cover crop to build soil health.  While we try to use cover crops as much as possible, some of our fields are planted so early in the spring, perhaps with peas, carrots, or spinach, that there is no time to deal with the residue of a cover crop.  These beds are then prepared in the fall but left bare for the winter.

Once our fields are prepared, we either direct seed or use transplants we've started in the greenhouse.  If there is a week in mid-March when the ground thaws, Derek makes sure to get peas, carrots, and spinach seeded.  These vegetables can germinate and survive even if cold weather returns with hard frosts. However, growth is very slow in the cold. 

Transplanted crops give us a jumpstart, sometimes with nearly two months of growth.  In our warmed greenhouse, we don't have to worry about cold temperatures inhibiting germination: little plants will pop up and grow steadily.  Sweet corn germinates earlier than it would in the field and much more uniformly.  It may seem odd to think of transplanting corn, but by using transplants we also avoid an early spring insect pest.  Seed corn maggot is a juvenile of a fly very similar to the house flies you are familiar with.  The maggots are active in very cool soils and they prefer to eat the large seeds of corn, beans, and peas.  Since cool soils also slow the development of our vegetable seeds, often the maggots destroy the viability of the seed before the plants can emerge.  Corn and bean transplants completely sidestep this hurdle.

So now that we've got little seedlings, and somewhat bigger transplants, growing in the fields, how can we protect them from freezing night time and cool daytime temperatures?