Must Be Planting Season

After a couple months of prepping and planning, we finally get some boots on the ground for the 2018 growing season! I hope you all ordered your seeds because planting will be here before you know it. Most of our seeds are in and the field plan has been drawn up. This year we will be doing the usual garden fare with an addition of an herb garden! Last year I heard several people ask if we do fresh herbs and this year we are going to give it a shot so stay tuned.

Late last week we got our first planting of onions in the ground. Our onions are grown from transplants. That means instead of ordering seeds and planting them, we get young plants from another farm to plant. Onions take a while to grow but don’t like overly hot temperatures. When the temperature gets too hot, they begin to bolt and seed which means that the time to harvest and eat the onion is over. As soon as an onion goes to seed, it’s no good for eating. The winters here in North Carolina, as mild as they may be, still get cold enough to kill young onion plants. If we wait for winter to be over before we plant the seeds, they will be ready for harvest in the heat of summer! The only way we can grow onions in our field is if we get a farm in a better climate (we get ours from Texas) to start them for us and then ship them when they become big enough to have some cold hardiness. That way, the onions will be ready for harvest in late spring/early summer before it gets hot enough to force them to bolt.

Another new thing for this year, we are going to be growing our own potatoes! We have tried potatoes in the past in both our field and in the greenhouse. They were put in where we had extra space and not necessarily in places specific to the unique growing aspects of potatoes. Potatoes are root crops. When it's time for harvest, they have to be dug up and allowed to dry before they can be washed and eaten. In our field, we use plastic mulch. In the onion picture above, that’s the black you see on the ground. It helps with weed and nutrient control. Crops like strawberries, tomatoes, and okra that grow above the ground do really well on plastic mulch. Even onions do well because their bulbs are not buried far under the surface. Potatoes, however, like to grow deep. To get them out of the ground takes some muscle (and for commercial farms, a tractor). If you grow potatoes in plastic, you would have to rip up the plastic to get it out of the ground. Not ideal. This year we have two uncovered rows just for potatoes, turnips and other root veggies.

The strawberries are blooming! At least the early varieties are. The berries we put in the greenhouse are actually starting to make fruit! That was more of an experiment than anything but it looks like it might work out. Now is a tricky time for strawberries. Because of the warmer weather we have been having, they think it’s spring time and they want to go. Last year, if you recall, we were picking strawberries about this time. That was way too early! This year is a little bit better but still slightly early. Right now we have to decide if we want to start protecting the plants from the cold and let them begin their growing cycle, or if we should pull the flowers off of them and keep them dormant until it’s the right time. If we let them grow, we will be starting to pick in early April!