Things are progressing nicely and Mother Nature has been fairly kind to us thus far. Everything except for a few tobacco plants are in the ground and thriving. Many plants are flowering and some are bearing fruit. Most of the melons, and vine plants are running and the bees seem to be content. We have been harvesting some Swiss Chard as well as White Kohlrabi for a couple of weeks now. Soon zucchini and cucumber should be on the list and the cabbage is heading nicely.

We had a minor setback with some of our root vegetables due to the cool spring weather and slow germination. Cool weather never seems to bother weeds and they managed to overtake the beets and other root crops. I ended up disking them under and replanting last weekend. As of last evening most have begun to poke through. Unfortunately this leaves us with a slight hole for variety as we probably won’t see beets for market until August now.

Weeds have been a slight issue in the sweet corn, potatoes, onions and strawberries. Not so much broadleaf weeds but grasses. I spent a couple of evenings this week thus far pulling the tall grass from the potatoes and then hilled them with the Super A which covered small weeds. I need to do the same to the onions. I also cultivated sweet corn for the 2nd time last night and hilled the larger plants. There is still a lot of grass in the corn and the only way to get it out is to be more aggressive with the hilling or find someone who will part with a couple of ounces of Laudis. I have used no herbicides except for pumpkin cover burn down and prefer to keep it that way but if I can’t get ahead of the grass I may be forced to resort to drastic measures.

Bug pressure has been pretty non-existent thus far but Colorado Potato Bugs have begun to appear and are munching on the potato leaves. Not much we can do about it this year but hopefully the tobacco will yield a usable organic pesticide next year. We are awaiting the dreaded mass of cucumber beetle that we always seem to be plagued with. European corn borer pressure is forecast to be fairly heavy this year. We’ll see. No one seems to like worms in their corn.

The cover between the plastic (oats, yellow peas & hairy vetch) is working fairly well. I have mowed it twice now. The clippings are blown onto the plastic to form a covering mulch which will protect the plastic from the sun’s UV which causes the plastic to become weak and brittle. 2 weeks ago during the hot spell we had I laid and hooked up the header pipe for the drip irrigation and have run it twice to date. I actually let it run all night last night. I have found a couple of breeches in the T-tape which I need to fix, lest I should flood some poor seedlings in the low ground.

With any luck we will be able to start our CSA program by July 1st. The cool Spring has set us back slightly but we are working to prevail. We will be extending the CSA program for as long as possible into fall, up to and probably past first frost into the pumpkin season.