We Have Tomato Plants for Sale

Come and get 'em.  We have every variety you can imagine, green, heirloom, cherry, paste, big red slicing tomatoes and many more.  They are at least a foot tall now and ready to be planted in the ground.  They have all been planted in very nutritious organic compost and some are even bearing fruit already.  You can stop by King Gardens in Longville or they are on the Neighborhood Gardeners vegetable stand near Women Lake (just south of Mcguires Inn).  We will also be bringing them to the farmers market at the Green Scene in Walker on June 16th.  I also checked on the carrots in the hoop house and they look really good, it took a long time for them to germinate but now that they are up they are really growing fast. 

We started weeding the outside gardens.  It is a lot different from the weeding we do in the hoop houses.  One major difference is the rocks, there are a lot of them and they are big. The other major difference is the type of weeds that grow in the outdoor gardens, with no protection from a hoop house any seed can blow in.  This also means there are a lot more weeds to be picked.  John and I spent the better part of a day weeding the large outdoor garden and we are still only half done. Tilling and loosening the ground around the plants helps prevent weeds from growing, in loose dirt it is more difficult for the weeds to put down roots.  Being an organic farm we obviously don't spray the fields to get rid of weeds...its the intern's two hands that get rid of weeds on this farm.  Here are a few pictures of the work we put in.

It looks like grass but these are red onions

Broccoli and cauliflower with rows of beans behind them

Radishes, left side has been weeded and the right side has not.

Lissa went around and wrapped the leaves around the cauliflower and pinned them together, this is to ensure the cauliflower heads stay white.  The heads will continue to grow, this does not slow down the growth at all so if you are growing cauliflower you may want to use this trick.  

John built a new leaf gate yesterday and we will use leaves that neighbors and friends brought over to fill it up.  Composting leaves is a little different, they take a lot longer to decompose so we do ours separately.  John and Lissa also compost fish guts, they get them from Ivanhoe Resort in Walker, MN.  The fish guts are also composted separately further away from the house, you can imagine what rotting fish guts might smell like.  John digs a hole and mixes the fish guts with leaf litter and lets it compost for about a year.  Each year in late spring/early summer he will mix the composted fish material with the other compost, this makes for an incredible nutrient rich soil that does such a nice job growing vegetables.