Produce

I'm getting really excited about the vegetables. Every time I go out to look at the vegetable beds I see more progress. Today we have a yellow summer squash that is at least 4" long and the bush beans have beautiful pink and purple flowers. The cucumbers are covered with yellow flowers that really set off their dark green leaves. It's amazing to see the colors and plants that started as little apparently inert seeds. The honey bees that are on our farm, owned by Boernsen Bees, are doing their part in making sure that all of the vegetable flowers are pollinated. Anybody who thinks that the world has evolved through random processes has never lived on a farm and watched the amazing interaction and complexity that works together. But I digress. The biodegradable corn-based plastic down each bed just seems to really turbo charged the growing process. The weeds along the sides of the plastic could become a real nucense when the time comes to pick, and they can really only be taken care of by hand and hoe. That is a lot of hoeing and with so much going on it is tough to get out there to hoe, but it will be good exercise for our farm crew (family labor). Next year we'll put down a cover crop like a rye that can be cut to create a good layer of mulch to keep the bare ground free from weeds. The most prolific and most hated weed is the cockle-burr. We really don't want to see that weed take control. I can only imagine them on our knees when picking! The alfalfa between the beds has worked pretty well too. George cut the alfalfa between the rows that border any vine plants. The worry there is that we have melons that are running into the alfalfa and alfalfa kind of lives in its roots, so the more you cut it the more it comes back. That means that at some point we will be searching for melons and cucumbers in the alfalfa between the beds. That issue is still a ways off, so for now we'll just try to keep the alfalfa cut back as much as possible before the vines travel too far.