Summer Projects
Greetings, farm friends!
Though it’s still hot, the weather cooled off a little bit for the end of the week, and we’ll take any reprieve we can get! The fields are filling up with plants, and the farm looks tidy and verdant these days. Our crew is doing a great job of tackling weeds and keeping everything in good shape. And, somehow, despite the extreme heat, we’ve managed to keep most of our plants alive!
Next week we will likely mow down some of our overwintered crops, including bachelors buttons, larkspur, and nigella, to make way for more fall crops. For now, the pollinators seem to be enjoying the bounty. As we inch towards July, more and more summer crops are coming into bloom. We’re back to harvesting strawflower, celosia, amaranth, and zinnias! These crops will be around until our first frost, and they’re really the workhorses that get us through the season. Elsewhere on the crops, more delicate specialty crops are budding up. In no time we’ll have dahlias and lisianthus galore.
Over the winter we applied for and received the Maryland Healthy Soils Competitive Fund grant, and work begins on Friday on some of the more intensive projects we received funding for! We received funding to supplement some things we’re already doing, like inter-cropping cover crops and using beneficial insects to manage pests, but what we really needed the extra help with was managing the flow of water around the farm. A contractor is going to install drain tiles to help alleviate the flow of rainwater that washes through the high tunnels that are situated on a hill. Above the tunnels, we’ll establish a hedgerow that we’ll be able to harvest from. We’re also going to have the contractor terrace a particularly steep section of the farm, where we’ll also plant a small hedgerow. We’re excited and hopeful that the projects will reduce soil erosion and help us establish more habitat for pollinators and other fauna.
Meg, Grey, and Erica deheading pansies on a sunny summer day.
We’re at the Baltimore Farmers Market this Sunday, June 30th from 7:00- 12:00!
We’re planning to bring bouquets, eucalyptus, snapdragons, rudbeckia, assorted bunches of flowers and Two Boots merch.
And, of course, the Build Your Own Bouquet bar is back!
A heads up that we’re taking a break from the market next week, 7/7, and i’ll be taking a break from the newsletter on 7/4! We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming the following week.
Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you at the market!
Amelia & The Two Boots crew
Juicy summer bouquets
We thinned pawpaw fruit this week. Despite the damage inflicted on some of the trees from herbicide drift, we’ve got a healthy looking crop on the way.
Greenhouse toad.