If you haven’t heard, it’s supposed to be in the triple digits for a few days here. It’s hot when it’s in the 80-90’s due to our climate and how moisture circulates due to the mountain ranges. 105 for two days, is going to scorch us. Many people don’t have air conditioning here as temperatures are usually fair year round.
So what’s that mean? Well for us that means most of our leafy greens will likely try to bolt from heat stress. Typically you want to harvest before that happens. But yikes, that’s a lot of food potentially gone. We’re going to try to keep things covered and water periodically to keep the plants cool. We’ll see how it goes…
Arugula
We’re currently harvesting; arugula, beet greens, our spring mix (4 types of lettuce), tangy mix (lettuce, mustard greens, and Toyko bekana), spicy mix (lettuce and mustard greens), leafy greens mix (lettuce and beat greens), Tatsoi (Asian spinach), Toyko bekana (Asian leafy green), radish, some beets- both red and golden; and red russian kale.
Toyko bekana
We have products harvested and available, or can pull fresh to order- if you are interested. Email us at PNWGratefulGardens@gmail.com to see what we have and to place an order.
Mustard greens
We can arrange delivery depending on location and amount ordered. Thanks and stay cool!
Kelsey and Megan create 100% dairy free artisan desserts from their online/pop-up bakery. They also attend many of the local farmers markets- like Monroe.
Check them out here – https://www.thesugarbellebakery.com or on Facebook. Just search for Sugar Belle Bakery.
Patrick and I planted over 100 tomato’s this morning. Beefsteak, red cherry, and sun gold. I use to grow 10 foot tomato’s back in Missouri. They’re harder here in the Pacific Northwest though. We just don’t have a lot of heat. So the window for tomato’s is short. Same with things like peppers and eggplant. We have a few plants with actual tomato’s, but those are for us.
To be honest, I’ve not had much luck with tomato’s here. But it’s another potential product line at the farmers market and everyone loves tomato’s. So, we’re giving them a shot. We’re already behind, but that’ll mean we will have them later in the season (hopefully). I debated on buying larger transplants, but we need it to work financially too.
We also backfilled all the sunflowers that didn’t sprout or that were already eaten by slugs 😒 my beer traps haven’t been successful. I’ll have to start nightly patrols until they can get large enough to sustain the damage.
After that we finished off the row of peas. I found another packet of seeds hiding in the pantry. So that rows done. We then moved on to fertilizing the leafy greens with natural fish emulsion to help boost potassium levels.
Patrick also had physical therapy this morning. They think he might have issues with depth perception still, so we’re going to look into that. Or an optometrist will. But we were able to get another yard of mulch on the way home so that worked out well. Now I just need to unload it before tomorrow’s market.
Everyone keeps asking about basil. It sells fast. But heres a photo, we do have them. Come to the booth early to get some before they are gone.
We did well this past week at the market, I was pleasantly surprised, We sold all the remaining carrots and peas we had in stock. We won’t see more those for another 40-50 days. Since my whole crop plan for this year was delayed by frost, successions didn’t get in on time. I was the only vendor to produce these, this early. So naturally, they went fast. Lesson learned.
The carrot bed was flipped and is now planted with spinach. Im still debating what to put behind the peas. They are nitrogen builders, so a leafy green is a good option. But we still have potatoes that have yet to go in the ground. So we’ll see.
Blueberries are coming in. Even with the plants being covered with nets, the birds are still having a field day. We’ll likely not take these to market either. I think we’ll eat them all before we get that chance.
Well we have more to get to today. Hope you all have a good one too. Thanks for stopping by.
Well, it’s been busy lately to say the least. Patrick helped me to pull the rest of our carrots this morning for the market later this afternoon. Our next succession of carrots is just starting to sprout. So these will be the last ones for awhile. Carrots are actually difficult to grow and many people struggle. They need almost constant moisture.
We prepped the bed for the next crop, but don’t have time to get them in today. I’m still debating what we’ll put in their place. We have ~450 lettuce starts currently sprouting but they’ll be another 3 weeks or so to go in the ground. The romaine lettuce is taking off since getting it in the ground though.
Patrick also helped with the harvest of peas and radish. He likes to give the extras and damaged ones to the chickens or pigs. When radishes take on too much water too fast, they’ll split. While they still taste good, most people don’t like how they look. We eat what we can and the rest go to producing meat products 😉
Last night our pregnant sow got out while Katy was working in her pen. She took a stroll around the garden. Luckily she didn’t cause too much damage and we were able to get her back in after chasing her around most of the property.
The peas were also cropped out. We put another 35 foot row in Monday evening, in the rain. I ran out of seeds before I made the 50 foot bed, so I’ll likely cycle something else in that 15 feet. I have another seed order inbound so that space will make for a good succession.
Tatsoi
The auxiliary greens -Arugula, two types of mustards, and the Asian greens (Toyko benaka and Tatsoi) should be ready for the next weeks market. I could likely harvest some this morning, but decided to wait for larger leaves.
Tokyo benaka
My main row of lettuce will likely be cropped out Sunday. We’re waiting to see how it recovers from this last cut. But our spring mix lettuce is really taking off and will rotate in its place.
Radishes and turnips were also planted Monday evening. We have three rows left to get into production. One will likely be reserved for green onions which are just now sprouting.
Think that’s it today. Hopefully we’ll see you this afternoon at the market.
We were invited late this week by the Sky Valley Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the City of Sultan to setup a booth at the Sultan Farmers Market.
We’ll be there tomorrow (Saturday) from 10am to 2 pm. I’m planning to have packaged lettuce, head lettuce, beet greens, our leafy greens mix, carrots, radishes, and various fresh herbs.
I’ll try to get an update shortly of what’s growing, and how things are doing. We have a lot growing, and more will be ready for the upcoming markets.
We’re bringing lettuce, red russian kale, spring mix (4 varieties of lettuce), leafy greens mix (beet greens and lettuce), peas, carrots, and fresh herbs! Got to go, hope to see you there!
Patrick was helping me this morning with quality assurance/quality control 😁
Quick update today as I’ve taken a few days off of blogging. I was able to transplant the romaine lettuce before heavy rains rolled in this morning. We’re basically rained out for the rest of the day though.
The yards becoming more of a marsh right now. It usually only does this in the fall when we get a lot of rain. Its hard to tell in this picture but there’s a ton of water collecting.
We didn’t have a market this week due to some other conflicts in our schedule. Namely Katy was being introduced to her new board and I took Patrick to his swim lessons. I got a massive document into final review this week at work, pretty happy about that. While we didn’t go, I did however get the wash pack station cleaned up and ready for the next harvest. Got more labels and compostable pint baskets ordered.
We might be taking carrots to the next market. They’re getting huge and pushing up the row cover. Another photo which is hard to tell… but if you compare the basil on the left, the carrots are extremely tall. I had to loosen the row cover so they can continue pushing up. These covers actually cover two beds so there’s some leeway with the basil being small.
My whole plan to not weed this season got thrown out the window. All due to cottonwoods. If you’ve not been the Pacific Northwest, we get snow in the end of May/early June. But it’s tree seeds being dispersed. All the rows which were not covered, now have tree seedlings starting to sprout so I’ve had to get on them pretty quickly.
They are even sprouting on the row cover edges. Anywhere the fluff collects, they are sprouting; like crazy. So our side yard is full and I’ve had to take some time each day to work on a new section. I’ve covered everything the best I can. It’ll be an uphill battle for awhile but shouldn’t be too bad if I keep up with it.
I still need to build the last two beds and plant the last five. I’ve been debating my crop plan. There will likely be another succession of arugula, spinach, onions, and I haven’t decided the others just yet. I might actually do two rows of onions. We’ll see. Debating on trying one as direct seeding while the transplants get larger.
Small break in the rain, got to go….Checking my uncovered broccoli for cabbage moth larvae. My whole pea trellis fell over too due to the weight, so that’s something that needs to be tackled.
Quick update on my lunch break. We built 5 more beds (shown below). These beds will go into a high tunnel later, so making sure they are cited properly is important.
I had to do a lot of leveling. These photos are alittle deceiving. There’s actually a significant slope to the left front corner. you can see it better in this photo where I was leveling it out. There’s still a slight rise at the wobbler riser, but it shouldn’t be too big of an issue. I leveled the top of the bed.
Sunflowers went in, three varieties. I took the picture the order they are in the bed trying to save myself some time.
Other than that we did some area beautification, as we’d refer to it in the Army. We put in a bunch of wine barrels, set posts, and hung lights on the patio.
We also are battling an unexpected source of weeds. More on that later. We are having to watch where Patrick falls in the yard- tons of bumblebees around. 👍
We had another 15 yards of compost delivered on Tuesday. This will be used to build another 7 beds.
Row covers were placed in field block 2. We don’t use pesticides so if we get row covers on early, we prevent issues by being proactive.
I decided to leave a ~4 ft section on the ends of each row to see how insect pressure does outside versus inside. Also I did this for each crop to see which one(s) are preferred over others. I also still have a few more to get up. I mostly wanted to get the turnips and carrots covered though.
I mentioned previously in my quick update that I planted 75 squash. Here’s what they look like right now:
Each one got some compost. They need more than compost though so they we’re transplanted into the native soil. They’re evenly spaced in rows for convenience during harvest and to give them good space to grow. I expect this area will fill out well later in the season.
Sunflowers didn’t get in yet. It got too dark and I was working on other tasks. But they’ll be planted tomorrow. They take roughly 50 days to harvest. So we’ve got some time before they go to market.
Basils been planted and romaine lettuce is hardening off
