Summer rolling in
Hello, farm friends!
We hope you’ve enjoyed this rainy, humid week. The crops seem happy to have some rainfall, and the heat has the flowers opening at a rapid clip. Some of our summer flowers have begun to make an appearance in our harvests. We’ve brought in hundreds of sunflowers this week, and the first cosmos are blooming. At the same time, our larkspur harvest has just begun, and the late spring flowers are still rolling in. Our time in the field is accompanied by the ever-growing roar of cicada song reverberating through the woods surrounding the farm. It’s starting to feel like summer has arrived.
Everything’s coming up beautifully in our fields!
With all of the rain, the weeds have started to take hold, so we’ve been busy clearing them away before they become too at home in the fields. Everything is growing quickly, so we’re in a race against time to get plants staked and netted, weeded, and tend to any other maintenance the crops may need. We plant successions of lettuce weekly, and have various flowers that we succession plant throughout June and July, but these days we’re spending a lot more time harvesting and maintaining existing crops than planting new ones. The changing pace keeps the job exciting! These days, there’s always something new to find in the fields, be it a new bloom, new pollinator visiting, or a new fungus growing. As a farmer, there’s never a dull day.
Sunday, June 13th, 8:00 am - 11:00 am: Johnny’s
We’ll be at market with arugula, sprouting broccoli, carrots , celery, edible flowers, garlic scapes, radishes, spring mix, and hakurei turnips.
We’ll have loads of bouquets, in addition to bunches of feverfew, poppies, campanula, larkspur, and snapdragons.
Take care,
Amelia and the rest of the Two Boots Farm crew
This may not look like much to you, but we interplanted sunflowers in our overwintered dahlia field and it’s been an extraordinary success! This allowed us to maximize space on our small farm, and we’ve gotten a great crop of sunflowers. We grow one-cut sunflowers, so each plant produces a single stem. To harvest the interplanted sunflowers, we cut at the very base of the plant, and then make a second cut to get the stem to our preferred length, dropping the remaining plant matter in the aisle and leaving it to break down. The overwintered dahlias are budding up nicely, and it looks like we’ll have a great early crop! We think we’ll harvest the very first blooms next week, just as we cut the last of the sunflowers.