Going Full Sauce

Logan assisting with the row cover. Big bushy row on the left is peanuts. Sparse row to the right of peanuts is our first planting of arugula, beet, broccoli, carrot, and kale (didn’t turn out so well). Two rows with row cover hoops are subsequent plantings of the same. Two tarped rows to far right are TBD (maybe unused until next season).

It’s almost time to start harvesting a lot of stuff from the garden. Elissa’s already been pulling tomatoes and some arugula, and we had cantaloupes a few weeks ago. Peanuts are due mid-October. We also have 3 rows of fall-ish veggies: arugula, beet, broccoli, carrot, and kale… each row planted two weeks apart across the month of August. We’ll see what we see with all that.

Meanwhile, we’re adding more grow lights and shelf space to the microgreens operation. We plan on bringing 11 different varieties to market on 9/28… newest additions being micro cilantro, and then a “regular” salad mix and a spicy salad mix. These are seed mixes that we got from True Leaf Market. It will be interesting to see how folks react to those.

Elissa pulling 5×5 trays out from our germination cooler. Radish for 9/28 market and basil for 10/5 market. We’ve also started “checkerboarding” the microgreens that like to tangle with each other across 5x5s (kale, broccoli, beet)… (see the third shelf down from the top). We essentially stagger four 5x5s in a 1020 tray rather than the full contiguous eight to minimize the entanglement problem.

Birds are doing well. The 7 laying leghorns are pumping out the eggs these days… I think we may be averaging 6 eggs a day from them, which is pretty good in percentage terms for us historically. These eggs are still on the small side, however, but we’re hoping they beef up as the birds mature. AND, we’ve started getting a trickle of duck eggs… maybe one a day. It ain’t much, but we’re hoping it’s a sign that the molting phase is coming to an end.

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