Light in June?
We don’t have as much produce available right now as one (meaning me) would expect. It’s the first real month of summer, we should be flush, right?? We’re not. We have some things, many things even, but perhaps not as much diversity and quantity as would be ideal for a humming market farm business. So what gives? Here are some thoughts for anyone interested:
Unexpected consequences. One of my goals for the farm this year is to refocus on quality and cut down on the time suck of growing things that just don’t do well here. Number one culprit: brassicas.
The brassica family is HUGE, and includes many of the crops that immediately jump to mind when you think of your average (beautiful) farm stand: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, bok choi, etc… None of these crops thrive on our farm. They tend to like very long, cool springs and mild summers. Here we have late frosts and early heat waves. We also have BUGS. The brassica family is plagued by flea beetles, cabbage moth caterpillars, and harlequin bugs, all of which we have in abundance. Every year (until this one) we have pushed the brassicas as far as we possibly can on this farm. We do two successions to try to get the early spring bump (often damaged by frost) and the early summer edge (almost always destroyed by bugs and heat). Every year (except this one) we struggle through the June brassica harvests sorting through bug eaten, burnt crops to find good food. We usually find some, but it feels like a poor use of time and energy, and I’m not always proud of what we put out there.
This year I finally decided to change the program. We put most of our energy into a larger, earlier planting of brassicas. We double covered them with thicker row cover for the early frosts and babied them along until they really started growing. And they did! We had an excellent, early flush of lovely broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage—some of the best we’ve ever grown. And unlike many years, we actually got to eat almost everything the plants produced, because the plants came in earlier and stronger before the major bug and heat pressure. This was a big win. We did plant a small second succession (I just couldn’t help myself!), but true to form we got that really intense early June heat wave and massive infestation of harlequin bugs and the plants looked just terrible. So, I mowed them under. Also really a huge win. We didn’t waste time or energy on harvesting a subpar crop, and we didn’t increase the bug population by letting the crop sit out there. But because of this we really didn’t have any brassicas after the first week in June (aside from storage cabbage, which is doing really well!).
On the whole I think we made the right choices and I think it’ll be permanent shift for us with these crops. And yet… I still can’t help feeling bad that we don’t have them on the table at market this month.
Crop failures. Last year the team dubbed it “the year of the carrot”. Finally, for perhaps the first year of my farming career, we had excellent carrots and beets all through the end of May and into July. Not the case this year. Our first succession of roots was weak. We’ve unfortunately seen a build up of disease in (what used to be) my favorite field for these crops. And our second succession just didn’t make it at all. Some combination of the timing of the seeding with the weather, the location I chose, and farmer error with our new seeder resulted in super low germination rates. So low, in fact, that I could not justify the time to hand weed the beds and made the painful decision to hoe in the crop and re-plant with onions. I’m really missing those babies right now. We’ve seeded two more times in hopes of catching up with ourselves and we are starting to see some good beets come in, but the carrot deficit is real. Maybe we’ll do better this fall…
Similarly, we had a lovely early round of sugar snap peas, but the second succession was a total loss. The first time I seeded it they didn’t come up at all. So next we replanted by hand and they looked lovely… until the bunnies (or maybe a fat groundhog) showed up. One weekend they came in and mowed down both rows of peas. They never recovered.
Living with my mistakes. This is our eighth season. The first four were in many ways much more productive than the last four. In those big early years, though, I did a lot of things wrong. Most egregiously I neglected the soil. I was so focused on building a business and getting the product out there that I naively assumed I couldn’t make irreparable mistakes.
Around year 5 I started to notice nutritional deficiencies in our summer crops, especially in the hoop houses. Only then did I take the time to truly focus on our most valuable asset: the soil. It turns out that in the process of growing as much as I could as fast as I could I was massively overusing a calcium based fertilizer. What started as well balanced (if difficult to manage—thanks Virginia clay!) soil structure on the farm now has PH levels so high that many of our longer season crops (think tomatoes) can’t absorb the nutrients they need to thrive. And I can’t fix it, at least not quickly. A problem that only took 4 years to create will likely take at least 10 if not 20 years to turn around.
There are things we can do to mitigate the problem (foliar feeding is huge!), and there are many crops that seem to grow well despite the nutritional imbalances (here’s looking at you lettuce), but the problem persists and it does really effect our summer crop yields. It is really painful to witness. A lot of times it is subtle, but many crops (squash, peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes for example) just do not produce as well as they should, or even as well as they once did, on this farm.
I get a lot of compliments on how well we have done building the business and on how good we are at marketing our products and our farm. And it is true, I am proud of what we have built, but sometimes (most times) I just wish I were a better farmer than marketer. Nothing makes me feel like more of an imposter than selling the community on the success of our small farm while watching our fruits die on the vine because of my own mistakes.