June potato planting – Sustainable Market Farming

Nadia eggplant. Photo credit Kathryn Simmons — Nadia eggplant.
Photo credit Kathryn Simmons

Now that we’ve got the garlic harvest behind us, as well as the June potato planting, we are turning our attention to weeding and mulching. We have hoed our leeks, our recent corn plantings, and the newest beans, squash and cucumbers. We have sowed some more beans, and some more cabbage and broccoli for fall. We weeded and mulched the eggplant, okra and slicing tomatoes.Eggplants are almost ready! Tomatoes are getting ripe! We walked through the watermelon patch and pulled out the weeds poking through the biodegradable plastic mulch, where it has started to crumble. Last week we did the same with the sweet potato patch.

Rows of Roma paste tomatoes, some on bioplastic, some no-till. Credit Bridget Aleshire

We’re getting ready to pull the weeds in the big Roma paste tomato patch, which also has biodegradable plastic mulch. Usually most of the patch is in a mowed no-till cover crop, but last winter we had colder-than-usual weather, and poorer-than-usual stands of legumes in our cover crops. So we decided to add compost, disk the cover crop in and use bioplastic for the whole Roma plot. As I said in my previous posts about bioplastics, they are especially good for vining crops, and although tomatoes can be grown sprawled on the ground, we don’t do that. We stake ours and use Florida String Weaving.

String-weaving tomatoes. Credit Kathryn Simmons

So when the bioplastic starts to break up, we need to cover the ground with something else. We unroll big round hay bales between the rows. (We planned for this, so the rows are just the right space apart.)

Another big task this week (and next) is clearing our spring sown carrots and beets, for storage in our walk-in cooler. Then we’ll steadily eat our way through them, as well as pickle some beets. Rumor has it that we still have some pickled beets from last year in the basement, although I haven’t checked that out. Carrots and beets get woody if left in the ground too long, especially in hot weather. So it’s better for us to harvest them all and store them under refrigeration.

Actually we had to jump to it and clear one bed of carrots this morning, because the bed is needed next Monday for more sowings of fall brassica seedlings. We’ll add compost, till it, then rake. The crew cleared the five 90′ rows in just half an hour, to my amazement. We got 3.5 big bags. I don’t think anyone weighed them, but they were the standard size 50# carrot bags, but not so full. Maybe 150# total. They were sown 3/15. We have two beds that were sown earlier, but we don’t need those beds quite so urgently!

Danvers Half-long carrots. Credit Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

Last week I gave a workshop on late fall, winter and early spring vegetables for some of the growers for the Local Food Hub in Charlottesville, VA. The goal was to help local growers of sustainable produce to grow more vegetables for late fall, during the winter, and again in early spring, so that Local Food Hub can supply this good food to more people locally. Here’s a pdf of the slideshow I presented. We also had worksheets for the five priority focus crops they had chosen: bunched carrots, bunched beets, romaine lettuce, spinach and cooking greens (kale, collards, chard and Asian greens). I enjoyed meeting the other growers and came away with some ideas myself.

I’ve started to take bookings for fall workshops. So far, this is where I’ll be:

Heritage Harvest Festival, Monticello, near Charlottesville. Friday September 12, 9-10am Growing and Storing Cold-Hardy Winter Vegetables

Mother Earth News Fair, Seven Springs, PA. Saturday and Sunday September 13-14, times to be decided

Crop Rotations for Vegetables and Cover Crops

Crop Planning for Sustainable Vegetable Production

Meanwhile, at home in our gardens, we’ve been dodging big rainfalls to get our garlic harvested. Not as much as last year – we lost quite a lot to the cold wet winter weather. But what we have got is now hanging in netting in our barn to dry and cure for a few weeks.

Also on our “very pressing” list of things to do is to cut our seed potatoes and get them planted. I wrote previously about our June potato planting. Most of the garden looks very good. I’m especially noticing that our recent corn planting has few weeds – it was last year’s watermelon patch and had the biodegradable plastic mulch. I had heard other growers say the biodegradable mulch reduced weeds in future years. It’s very gratifying to see that with my own eyes. We are uncovering various cucurbits that are now flowering, so that the pollinators can get o work. (We had them covered to protect the small plants from striped cucumber beetles.) The watermelons look pretty good. the second cucumbers were full of weeds, but we are working our way along the row.

Many of the raised beds look very weedy, but nothing a big round of rototilling won’t fix! Our nine pea beds need to go. It’s a happy bit of timing that our first green beans are ready as soon as the peas give up! That way we don’t have to pick both at once.

Talking of weeds, I enjoyed a recent post by Margaret Roach on her blog A Way to Garden. In particular she mentions mugwort, which we have as an escapee from a previous deliberate planting. She also has a nice photo of galinsoga, one of our worst summer weeds in the raised beds, and links to various other weedy pages.

Tag: June potato planting

Harvesting carrots and beets, weeding, mulching.

Slideshow on late fall, winter and early spring vegetables; Upcoming events; Know your weeds.