Sunday drive...

This is echo basin in the nearby la platas. I went up here to harvest some wild plants.



This is just a pic of a long dead tree but I've never seen wood look like this before...

Tour of the greenhouses...

First the big new hoophouse. Mostly tomatoes in here but also some sweet peppers, which don't grow near as tall as the tomatoes. I grow mostly semi- determinates. Which means they fruit for about a month and don't grow quite as tall. Something new this year is a row of three or four varieties paste tomatoes for making sauce and salsa. Hopefully one of them does really well here. Generally when I test varieties of a certain crop only one out of five types will really grow well.



This is my house of fennel. Last year it was my new favorite veggie, so now it is getting a hoophouse all to itself. The covered bed on the right is the early fennel crop. The left bed is next to be harvested, and the center bed is for fall harvest.



This hoophouse is filled with a delicious heirloom zucchini and a healthy bed of basil.


Last we have the low tunnels....
This one is filled with sweet potato. I've never grown this many before but they seem to be doing well in here.



I now know that the cucumber went happy in the past due solely to being cold at night. These are the best looking cukes I have ever grown. Next week we will pinch the ends off the vines to keep them from getting too crazy and producing more fruit than there is time to have ripen.

Every Monday....

The top priority each week is seeding. We harvest every week, so whatever gets harvested each week has to be seeded each week. The standard is two 70 ft beds lettuce mix, two beds spinach, one bed arugula, one bed carrot. Every third week beets, cilantro, iceberg lettuce, and Bok choy are seeded in addition. This keeps the food flowing! For a home garden I would recommend having enough beds (maybe 40) to seed every three weeks. Of course maybe half of those forty beds are full season crops like onions or taters, which are planted once, and harvested little by little.
Here I am with the greatest tool ever. The seeder. This one is made by earthway. It makes the job go really fast, and is worthwhile even for a home garden.

Thunderstorm in the valley at sunset

This was taken from the roof of my new house. Nice rainbow over Miles n Maeves farm. My farm is the one under the setting sun.


This happens about weekly in the summer here. The mountains with rainclouds are west of the valley, so the sun lights them up at the end of the day.

Taters!

These may be my favorite potatoes in the world....


They are called purple vikings and they taste really delicious, are very early, and also look great! It's nice to have some really filling food coming out of the ground now.
I cooked some with some really nice little organic red potatoes from the store and the little reds were bad in comparison to these purples. I guess a potato isn't just a potato.....
Growing your own is the way to eat!

Crazy farming friends...Pt.1

Time to meet my neighbors!
These are my my good friends Miles and Maeve. They are crazy enough to buy land almost next door to me and try farming out for themselves. I think things are going really well for them. Better than my first year on new land anyway.




Doesn't Maeve look stylish?



Now that they have food growing "Food For All" farms is doing something novel- giving a third of what they grow to local food charities! Three cheers for them!

Rainy season is here. Barely.

Finally some clouds rolling in to relieve us from the heat. This one was a bit scary though, but luckily no hail.

-Dave

First week for csa home deliveries

This was the first week of fifteen weeks of my C.S.A. "subscription vegetable home delivery program". Below is a photo of what the bag had in it.


The great people who sign up for my c.s.a. have "Dibs" on things like carrots because they paid me up front for the whole summer season. So, sorry market shoppers! This is why I didn't have carrots for sale last weekend.