Another Week on the Farm

This week in the exciting world of Piedmont Produce!

…not much new stuff happened.

We have been keeping very busy with picking squash, cucumbers, and okra while still working on drying out our massive onion crop. To dry out our onions we have been putting them on pallets in a barn so the air can get all around them without any moisture/rain/dew/etc. making them wet and rot. Once one onion rots, all the other onions around it rot so it is very important to keep an eye on your onions while they are drying and pick out any that might turn bad! Luckily we haven’t had too many turn on us but we are keeping a close eye on them.

To allow them to dry even better we are starting to hang them around the barn. That way they don’t even touch the pallets which means even less of a chance to turn bad. It also looks pretty cool with all these bunches of onions hanging around. Nice decoration, maybe not so nice as an air freshener…

In other news we have officially started picking tomatoes! Not a lot of them yet but we did pick one full box of nice red tomatoes on Wednesday. We should have plenty more coming in from now on. For all you tomato growers out there keep an eye out for tomato blight! We have seen a few instances of early and late blight on some of our tomatoes.

Make sure you cut out any infected branches and take them away from the field to be discarded. Blights are actually contagious to other tomato plants. Infected branches and leaves can be eaten by insects. Then when those insects jump to another, healthy plant they could spread the disease! Early and late blight have been known to wipe out entire fields of tomatoes so it’s very important to scout your fields and catch things early.

Since we have so many cucumbers and squash right now we are starting to wholesale them to local restaurants. If you find yourself in either Quincey’s in Monroe, the Crossroads Diner next door to our store, or the Fresh House in Locust make sure you order the squash and get a salad because they will be using fresh Piedmont Produce goodies!

Tune in next week for…

                Cantaloupes! We should start picking some early in the week.

Get to know your farm!